The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World [2 ed.] 9781003198345, 9781032056128, 9781032056135
Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages and social settings, The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Aroun
196 58 9MB
English Pages 708 Year 2023
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of contributors
List of figures
Preface
Introduction
Part I The Americas
1 Sociolinguistics in the USA
2 Sociolinguistics in Canada
3 Sociolinguistic research into Indigenous languages of North America
4 Sociolinguistics in Mexico: defining new agendas
5 Sociolinguistics in Central America
6 Sociolinguistic research into Indigenous languages of South America
7 Sociolinguistics in Brazil
8 Sociolinguistics in Hispanic South America
9 Sociolinguistics in the Caribbean
10 The sociolinguistics of the Atlantic Englishes
Part II Asia
11 China: sociolinguistic research in the 21st century
12 Sociolinguistics of the Indo-European languages in South Asia: looking beyond the 60s
13 Sociolinguistics of Dravidian languages in South Asia
14 Sociolinguistics of South Asia: Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic and other languages
15 Sociolinguistics in Mongolia
16 Sociolinguistics in Japan
17 Korea: recent trends in sociolinguistic research
18 Sociolinguistics in Mainland Southeast Asia
19 Sociolinguistics in Maritime Southeast Asia
20 Sociolinguistic research into Turkic languages: Turkey, Northern Cyprus and Turkic states in Central Asia
21 Sociolinguistic research into Iranian languages
22 Sociolinguistics of Arabic in the Middle East
23 Sociolinguistics in Israel: from Hebrew hegemony to Israeli plurilingualism
24 Sociolinguistics in the Caucasus
Part III Australasia
25 Sociolinguistics in Australia
26 Sociolinguistic research into Indigenous languages of Australia
27 Sociolinguistics in New Zealand
28 Sociolinguistics in the Pacific
29 Sociolinguistics in New Guinea
Part IV Africa
30 Sociolinguistics in North Africa
31 Sociolinguistic studies of West and Central Africa
32 Sociolinguistics in East Africa
33 Sociolinguistics in Lusophone Africa
34 Sociolinguistics in southern Africa
35 Sociolinguistics in South Africa
36 Sociolinguistic research into Indian Ocean languages
Part V Europe
37 Sociolinguistics in the German language area
38 Sociolinguistics in the Dutch language area
39 Sociolinguistics in the Nordic region
40 Sociolinguistics in Britain
41 Sociolinguistics in Ireland
42 Sociolinguistics of the Celtic languages
43 Sociolinguistics in the French language area
44 Sociolinguistics in Italy
45 Sociolinguistics in Switzerland
46 Sociolinguistics in Luxembourg
47 Sociolinguistics in Spain: from the polycentrism of the field to activist practices in super diverse contexts
48 Sociolinguistics in Portugal
49 Sociolinguistics in Malta
50 Sociolinguistics in East Central Europe
51 Sociolinguistics in the Balkans
52 Sociolinguistics in Russia
53 Sociolinguistics in Ukraine
54 Sociolinguistics in the Baltic States: language dynamics research
Language index
Subject index
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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS AROUND THE WORLD
Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages and social settings, The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World was originally the first single-volume collection surveying the current research trends in international sociolinguistics. This new edition has been comprehensively updated and significantly expanded, and now includes more than 50 chapters written by leading authorities and a brand-new substantial introduction by John Edwards. Coverage has been expanded regionally and there is a critical focus on Indigenous languages. This handbook remains a key tool to help widen the perspective on sociolinguistics to readers interested in the field. Divided into sections covering the Americas, Asia, Australasia, Africa, and Europe, the book provides readers with a solid, up-to-date appreciation of the interdisciplinary nature of the field of sociolinguistics in each area. It clearly explains the patterns and systematicity that underlie language variation in use, along with the ways in which alternations between different language varieties mark personal style, social power, and national identity. The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World is the ideal resource for all students in undergraduate sociolinguistics courses and for researchers involved in the study of language, society, and power. Martin J. Ball is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University and Visiting Professor in Speech-Language Pathology at Wrexham Glyndŵr University, both in Wales. Rajend Mesthrie is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Chiara Meluzzi is Senior Researcher in Linguistics at the University of Milan “La Statale”, Italy, where she teaches general linguistics for the BA in Liberal Studies in Communication.
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS AROUND THE WORLD Second Edition
Edited by Martin J. Ball, Rajend Mesthrie, and Chiara Meluzzi
Designed cover image: © Getty Images | Ailime Second edition published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Martin J. Ball, Rajend Mesthrie and Chiara Meluzzi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Martin J. Ball, Rajend Mesthrie and Chiara Meluzzi to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2009 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ball, Martin J. (Martin John), editor. | Mesthrie, Rajend, editor. | Meluzzi, Chiara, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of sociolinguistics around the world/edited by Martin J. Ball, Rajend Mesthrie, Chiara Meluzzi. Description: Second edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022061696 | ISBN 9781032056128 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032056135 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003198345 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sociolinguistics. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P40 .R69 2023 | DDC 306.44 – dc23/eng/20230104 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061696 ISBN: 978-1-032-05612-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05613-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19834-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of contributors xi List of figures xxxi Prefacexxxii
Introduction John Edwards
1
PART I
The Americas
9
1 Sociolinguistics in the USA Kirk Hazen
13
2 Sociolinguistics in Canada Marisa Brook
28
3 Sociolinguistic research into Indigenous languages of North America Éedaa Heather Dawn Burge, Shayleen Macy EagleSpeaker, Jaeci Nel Hall, Amanda Cardoso and Gabriela Pérez Báez
39
4 Sociolinguistics in Mexico: defining new agendas José Antonio Flores Farfán
54
5 Sociolinguistics in Central America Brandon Baird
65
v
Contents
6 Sociolinguistic research into Indigenous languages of South America Viviana Quintero and Serafín M. Coronel-Molina
74
7 Sociolinguistics in Brazil Ronald Beline Mendes
85
8 Sociolinguistics in Hispanic South America Manuel Díaz-Campos and Matthew Pollock
95
9 Sociolinguistics in the Caribbean Joseph T. Farquharson and Bettina Migge
108
10 The sociolinguistics of the Atlantic Englishes Rosemary Hall, Hannah Hedegard, Andrea Sudbury, Nicole Holliday, Daniel Schreier and David Britain
120
PART II
Asia131 11 China: sociolinguistic research in the 21st century Minglang Zhou 12 Sociolinguistics of the Indo-European languages in South Asia: looking beyond the 60s Shobha Satyanath 13 Sociolinguistics of Dravidian languages in South Asia G. Balasubramanian and S. Arulmozi 14 Sociolinguistics of South Asia: Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic and other languages David Bradley and Panchanan Mohanty
133
146 170
184
15 Sociolinguistics in Mongolia Bolormaa Shinjee and Sender Dovchin
197
16 Sociolinguistics in Japan Florian Coulmas
206
17 Korea: recent trends in sociolinguistic research Hyeon-Seok Kang
217
vi
Contents
18 Sociolinguistics in Mainland Southeast Asia David Bradley
227
19 Sociolinguistics in Maritime Southeast Asia Rebecca Lurie Starr
238
20 Sociolinguistic research into Turkic languages: Turkey, Northern Cyprus and Turkic states in Central Asia Yasemin Bayyurt and Işıl Erduyan
248
21 Sociolinguistic research into Iranian languages William O. Beeman
259
22 Sociolinguistics of Arabic in the Middle East Marie-Aimée Germanos
269
23 Sociolinguistics in Israel: from Hebrew hegemony to Israeli plurilingualism Joel Walters, Dafna Yitzhaki, Shulamith Kopeliovich, Zhanna BursteinFeldman, Carmit Altman, Sharon Armon-Lotem and Natalia Meir 24 Sociolinguistics in the Caucasus Diana Forker and Victor Friedman
278
289
PART III
Australasia301 25 Sociolinguistics in Australia Peter Collins
303
26 Sociolinguistic research into Indigenous languages of Australia Jill Vaughan, Ruth Singer and Gillian Wigglesworth
312
27 Sociolinguistics in New Zealand Jennifer Hay and Margaret Maclagan
323
28 Sociolinguistics in the Pacific Eleanor Ridge, Sally Akevai Nicholas and Richard Benton
333
29 Sociolinguistics in New Guinea Mark Donohue
348
vii
Contents PART IV
Africa359 30 Sociolinguistics in North Africa Catherine Miller and Dominique Caubet
361
31 Sociolinguistic studies of West and Central Africa Bruce Connell and David Zeitlyn
371
32 Sociolinguistics in East Africa Christina Higgins
382
33 Sociolinguistics in Lusophone Africa Laura Álvarez López
391
34 Sociolinguistics in southern Africa Susanne Mohr, Irina Turner and Sibonile E. Ellece
400
35 Sociolinguistics in South Africa Rajend Mesthrie and Yolandi Ribbens-Klein
411
36 Sociolinguistic research into Indian Ocean languages Rada Tirvassen
423
PART V
Europe433 37 Sociolinguistics in the German language area Falco Pfalzgraf
435
38 Sociolinguistics in the Dutch language area Jeroen Darquennes
445
39 Sociolinguistics in the Nordic region Sally Boyd and Natalia Ganuza
454
40 Sociolinguistics in Britain Natalie Braber
467
41 Sociolinguistics in Ireland Raymond Hickey
478
viii
Contents
42 Sociolinguistics of the Celtic languages Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin
488
43 Sociolinguistics in the French language area Nadine Di Vito
501
44 Sociolinguistics in Italy Massimo Cerruti and Silvia Dal Negro
518
45 Sociolinguistics in Switzerland Philippe Humbert, Zorana Sokolovska, Laura Baranzini, Matteo Casoni, Sabine Christopher, Renata Coray and Stephan Schmid
530
46 Sociolinguistics in Luxembourg Christoph Purschke and Peter Gilles
542
47 Sociolinguistics in Spain: from the polycentrism of the field to activist practices in super diverse contexts Luisa Martín Rojo, Gabriela Prego and Anna Tudela
550
48 Sociolinguistics in Portugal Alexandra Guedes Pinto
560
49 Sociolinguistics in Malta Sarah Grech
569
50 Sociolinguistics in East Central Europe Miklós Kontra, Marián Sloboda, Jiří Nekvapil and Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak
576
51 Sociolinguistics in the Balkans Robert Greenberg
598
52 Sociolinguistics in Russia Olga Blinova, Natalia Bogdanova-Beglarian, Tatiana Popova and Tatiana Sherstinova
613
53 Sociolinguistics in Ukraine Olga Ivanova
631
ix
Contents
54 Sociolinguistics in the Baltic States: language dynamics research Gabrielle Hogan-Brun and Ineta Dabašinskienė
642
Language index Subject index
651 654
x
CONTRIBUTORS
Carmit Altman’s interdisciplinary research on bilingual processing and developmental language disorder draws from psycholinguistics; her interest in social identity and language use in bilingual preschool children draws from sociolinguistics. Her research on bilingual language development and narrative intervention has been supported by grants from the Binational Science Foundation, Israeli Scientific Foundation, and from the Ministry of Education. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Bilingualism, Applied Psycholinguistics, Plos One, and Frontiers in Psychology. She is head of the Child Development Program in the Faculty of Education and is affiliated with the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University. Altman is the deputy director of Bilingualism Matters, Israel, and the co-director of the Impact Center on Multilingualism and Multiculturalism across the Lifespan. Laura Álvarez López is Full Professor of Portuguese Linguistics at Stockholm University. She has held positions as postdoctoral fellow and then visiting scholar at the University of Campinas in Brazil, and spent one semester as visiting scholar at UC Berkeley (fall semester 2022). She is a member of the editorial team of five academic journals. She has published extensively in Portuguese and Spanish sociolinguistics with special focus on language contact, variation, and change in multilingual settings. In 2018, she edited a volume on the Portuguese Language Continuum in Africa and Brazil for John Benjamins Publishing Company. Sharon Armon-Lotem is Full Professor in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics and the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar Ilan University, Israel. She is the director of Bilingualism Matters, Israel, and the Bar-Ilan Impact Center for Multilingualism and Multiculturalism across the Lifespan. She is an expert in typical and atypical language development in monolingual and bilingual children. Her research combines linguistic (including lexical knowledge, morpho-syntax and narratives) and cognitive (including memory and executive functions) perspectives on the characteristics of Developmental Language Disorders (DLD, SLI), and bilingualism in preschool and early school-age children. S. Arulmozi is Professor at the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of Hyderabad, India. His areas of prime research are language analysis, sociolinguistics, xi
Contributors
corpus studies, and language endangerment studies. He has carried out mission projects on building lexical resources in Tamil and Telugu. Professor Arulmozi has published widely in national and international journals. Brandon Baird is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Luso-Hispanic Studies and Director of the Linguistics Program at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA). His research primarily focuses on the Mayan language K’iche’ and Guatemalan Spanish, and he has published widely in Hispanic linguistics, Mayan linguistics, phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, and bilingualism. He is a co-editor of the forthcoming volume Linguistic Advances in Central American Spanish with Brill Publishers. G. Balasubramanian is the former Vice Chancellor of Tamil University, Thanjavur. Earlier he was the Rector of Dravidian University Kuppam and held the position of Professor and Head in the same university, and was Visiting Professor in South Asian Studies at Warsaw University. He previously taught linguistics at Calicut University. His area of interest includes sociolinguistics, tribal linguistics, applied linguistics, and Tamilalogy. Professor Balasubramanian has published in reputed journals and he has translated a couple of literary works from Tamil to Malayalam and English to Tamil. Martin J. Ball is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University and Visiting Professor in Speech-Language Pathology at Wrexham Glyndŵr University, both in Wales. He previously held positions in Wales, Ireland, the US, and Sweden. He co-edits two academic journals and two book series. He has published widely in communication disorders, phonetics, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and Welsh linguistics. He recently edited the Manual of Clinical Phonetics for Routledge (2021). He is an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, and a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. He currently lives in the Republic of Ireland. Laura Baranzini, see Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana. Yasemin Bayyurt is Full Professor of Applied Linguistics at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. Her current research on sociolinguistic and methodological aspects of English and English language teaching/learning focuses on localization and implementation of a CLIL approach in English classrooms for young learners in K12 schools; World Englishes (WE)/English as a lingua franca (ELF)-awareness and intercultural citizenship development in language classrooms; emerging multilingualism in the linguistic landscape of metropolitan cities; English as medium of instruction (EMI) in higher education; and digitalization in K12 education. Her publications include articles in various indexed journals (e.g., Language Culture and Curriculum, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development) and edited books and book chapters published by national/international publishers. She most recently edited Bloomsbury World Englishes Volume 3: Pedagogies (2021). William O. Beeman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota with primary specialization in linguistic anthropology. He has conducted research in the Middle East for more than 40 years with special expertise in Iran and the Persian Gulf region. He is author or editor of more than 100 scholarly articles, 500 opinion pieces, and 14 books, including Language, Status and Power in Iran, and The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other. In addition, he has written extensively on music and performance traditions both in Western and non-Western traditions. His latest book on this topic is Iranian Performance Traditions. He is currently completing two books: Understanding Iran and Music, Emotion and Evolution. xii
Contributors
Richard Benton completed his MA and PhD degrees at the University of Hawai’i, and has researched, written, and lectured internationally on sociolinguistics, language policy, and bilingual education. Since retiring as a research professor with the University of Waikato’s research program on laws and institutions for Aotearoa New Zealand he has remained active in research and writing as an honorary member of the university’s Te Piringa Faculty of Law. He served as President of the Polynesian Society from 2010 to 2021, and remains a member of the Society’s Council. He is also a member of the International Advisory Panel of Terralingua. Olga Blinova currently works as Assistant Professor in the Department of General Linguistics, at St. Petersburg State University, and in the Department of Philology, at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, in St. Petersburg. Olga does research in corpus linguistics, Russian morphosyntax, spoken discourse analysis, and language complexity. Her current project “Understanding Official Russian: The Legal and Linguistic Issues” is supported by the Russian Science Foundation, grant #19–18–00525. Natalia Bogdanova-Beglarian is Doctor of Philology, Professor in the Russian Language Department at St. Petersburg State University, and conducts seminars at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod. For a number of years she taught Russian at Clemson (USA) and Groningen (Netherlands), and lectured at Northwestern University (Chicago, USA), the Institute of Slavic Studies at the University of Hamburg (Germany), the University of Würzburg (Germany), the faculty of Slavic studies of the National Chzhenchzhi University (Taiwan), and the universities of China – Dalian Polytechnic (Dalian), Capital Pedagogical (Beijing), and Beijing Pedagogical (Beijing). Natalya Bogdanova-Beglarian is a well-known specialist in the field of Russian orthoepy and corpus linguistics, as well as the developer of two wellknown linguistic resources – the corpus of Russian everyday speech “One Speech Day” (ORD) and the corpus of Russian monologue speech “Balanced Annotated Text Library” (SAT), and is the head of a number of projects supported by Russian Science Foundations. She publishes widely in the field of corpus linguistics, colloquialistics, socio- and psycholinguistics; has more than 500 published scientific papers; and has prepared 20 PhDs. Currently she lives in St. Petersburg, Russia. Sally Boyd is Professor Emerita in General Linguistics at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research has mainly been in the fields of sociolinguistics and multilingualism. Important themes have been language maintenance and shift, language attrition, attitudes to foreign accent, national language policy, language alternation in conversation, variation and change in urban contact settings, as well as micro language policy in interaction. She has conducted sociolinguistically oriented research among bi- and multilingual children, young people, and adults primarily in Sweden, but also in Australia and in other countries in the Nordic Region, particularly Finland. Natalie Braber is Professor of Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University. She has published widely in sociolinguistics, including work on language variation and change in the East Midlands of England; identity; working with community groups and “pit talk” (language of coal miners) and earwitness testimony. She edited Sociolinguistics in England (with Sandra Jansen) for Palgrave (2018) and produced monographs on East Midlands English (with Jonnie Robinson) for Mouton (2018) and Lexical Variation in an East Midlands Mining Community for Edinburgh University Press (2022). She currently lives in Nottingham, in England. David Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University and Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University. He has previously held positions at various xiii
Contributors
universities in the US, France, UK, India, China, and Thailand. He is President of the UNESCO Comité International Permanent des Linguistes 2013–2024, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. His research is mainly on the sociolinguistics and historical linguistics of languages in Southeast, East, and South Asia. His most recent book is Language Endangerment, published in 2019 by Cambridge. David Britain is Professor of Modern English Linguistics at the University of Bern. His research interests embrace language variation and change, varieties of English (especially in Southern and Eastern England, the Southern Hemisphere, especially New Zealand, Australia and the Falkland Islands, and the Pacific, especially Micronesia), dialect contact and attrition, new dialect formation, second dialect acquisition, dialect ideologies and the use of new technologies, such as smartphone applications, in collecting dialect data. He is also actively engaged in research at the dialectology-human geography interface, especially with respect to space/place, urban/rural, and the role of mobilities. David was Associate Editor of Journal of Sociolinguistics from 2008 to 2017. Marisa Brook is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include mechanisms of linguistic change, discourse pragmatics, language contact, computer-mediated communication, and World Englishes. Articles of hers have appeared in Language Variation and Change, American Speech, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Linguistics Vanguard, English Language and Linguistics, the International Journal of Bilingualism, and the Journal of Linguistic Geography. Éedaa Heather Dawn Burge is an adopted member of the Lingít G̱ aanax̱ teidí clan of Tlákw Aan (Klukwan, Alaska), as well as the grandchild of the Kanienʼkehá:ka (Mohawk) people from Akwesasne. She also has a masterʼs degree in linguistics and is currently a term assistant professor of Alaska Native languages at the University of Alaska Southeast as well as a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her work focuses on Indigenous language revitalization and relationship building and breakdowns with academic institutions. Zhanna Burstein-Feldman holds a PhD in English linguistics from Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests include language and identity construction, social aspects of language acquisition, second language acquisition among young children in bilingual families, and lexical retrieval processes in first language attrition. Her current research focuses on multilingual and multicultural sensitivity on university and college campuses. She is the head of the English as a Foreign Language Department at Bar Ilan University. Amanda Cardoso is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia, a member of the Speech in Context Lab, and affiliated member of the UBC Language Sciences Institute and the UBC Centre for Migration Studies. Her work centers around language variation and change in a number of languages, both diachronically and synchronically, and its relationship to instance of massive immigration, methodological advances in (socio-)phonetics, and language attitudes and their social consequences. Recent projects have included linguistic investigations of Indigenous languages where Amanda and/or co-authors collaborate with and consult with those Indigenous communities, or where the co-author is a member of the Indigenous community. Matteo Casoni, see Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana. xiv
Contributors
Dominique Caubet is Professor Emerita of Arabe maghrébin at INALCO, Sorbonne Paris Cité. She has published a reference description of Moroccan Arabic (with emphasis on aspect, modality, negation, and determination). She is a dialectologist of North Africa. As a sociolinguist she published on issues such as code-switching, youth language, urban subcultures, the Diaspora, and the informal passage to writing on keyboards (in Latin and Arabic script) from SMS and cybercafés in the 2000s to smartphones. She also specialized in cultural studies analyzing the role of artistic scenes in the recognition by civil societies of non-official languages. She has co-edited several books on linguistic and sociolinguistic issues and published over 125 articles and chapters on all these subjects since 1983. Massimo Cerruti is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Turin. He has been Research Assistant and subsequently Adjunct Professor of Italian Linguistics at the University of Bern. His research focuses on sociolinguistic variation in Italian, dialect/standard convergence in ItaloRomance, and code-switching between Italian and Italo-Romance dialects. His publications include Towards a New Standard: Theoretical and Empirical Studies on the Restandardization of Italian (with C. Crocco and S. Marzo, eds.), Mouton De Gruyter, Berlin-New York (2017); and Intermediate Language Varieties. Koinai and Regional Standards in Europe (with S. Tsiplakou, eds.), John Benjamins, Amsterdam-Philadelphia (2020). He is co-coordinator of the KIParla Corpus (www.kiparla.it). Sabine Christopher, see Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana. Peter Collins is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He has published widely; his books include Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English (Routledge), Modals and Quasi-Modals in English (Rodopi), Grammatical Change in English World-Wide (Benjamins), and the textbook English Grammar: An Introduction (with C. Hollo, Palgrave Macmillan). He was a co-author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CUP), and editor of the Australian Journal of Linguistics for five years. His research focuses on the grammar of English, Australian English, World Englishes, and corpus linguistics. Bruce Connell is Professor of Linguistics at York University in Toronto, Canada, and held the International Fancqui Professorship 2021–22 at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He previously held positions at the University of Oxford as Director of the University of Oxford Phonetics Laboratory and Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and at the University of Canterbury in Kent. He is Associate Editor of Studies in African Linguistics. He has published widely in the areas of phonetics, language endangerment, sociolinguistics, and comparative-historical linguistics. He has conducted fieldwork in many parts of West and Central Africa and continues to do so, with primary focus on the Mambiloid languages of the Nigeria-Cameroon borderland. Together with David Zeitlyn he has worked on aspects of language endangerment and the interaction of language and history in the Mambiloid region. He lives in Toronto. Renata Coray is a research coordinator at the Institute of Multilingualism at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and lives in Zurich and in Romansh-speaking Grisons. Previously, she worked as a research assistant at the universities of Fribourg and Zurich, where she completed her PhD with a publication on the Romansh language maintenance and standardization debates. In addition, she worked as a research assistant at the Federal Office of Culture and at a publishing house. Her sociolinguistic research and publication activities focus on Swiss language and minority policy; multilingualism in public institutions, in the workplace, and in crisis communication; and on language biographies, ideologies, and myths. xv
Contributors
Serafín M. Coronel-Molina is an Indigenous scholar from South America and Professor of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Indiana University. He held a named and endowed title of Indiana University Bicentennial Professor from 2019 to 2021. His books include Language Ideology, Policy and Planning in Peru and Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Americas (with T.L. McCarty). He was also a guest editor and coeditor for the following Special Issues: Language Contact and Universal Grammar in the Andes (with M. Rodríguez-Mondoñedo), Translingual Literacies (with B.L. Samuelson), and Indigenous Language Regimes in the Americas, The Politics of Language, and New Frameworks for Language Revitalisation in the 21st Century: Case Studies from the Americas and Europe (with L. Comajoan-Colomé). Florian Coulmas is Senior Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen. He spent the better part of his professional life in Japan teaching and doing research at universities in Tokyo and Hiroshima and serving for 10 years as director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo. Currently, he teaches language policy and language planning at the trilingual Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, using his book Guardians of Language, Oxford University Press (2017). Ineta Dabašinskienė is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Lithuanian Studies and Head of the Research Centre for Multilingualism at Vytautas Magnus University. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, language policy and multilingualism, monolingual and bilingual language acquisition, heritage language, language education, as well as grammar and pragmatics of spoken language. As an internationally recognized researcher, she has published and co-edited numerous research studies and a number of scholarly articles in Lithuanian and international scientific journals. She is a member of editorial boards of several national and international scientific journals and participates in the activities of various scientific associations and professional organizations. Silvia Dal Negro is Full Professor of Linguistics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), Faculty of Education, where she directs an MA in applied linguistics. She has studied foreign languages and literatures at the University of Bergamo, and has obtained a PhD in linguistics at Pavia. She has been a tenured researcher at the Università del Piemonte Orientale where she has mainly worked in the research field of minority languages in the Alpine space. She is now active especially in the domains of contact linguistics and language education. Jeroen Darquennes is Full Professor of German and General Linguistics at the University of Namur and an affiliated researcher at the Mercator Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning (Fryske Akademy) in Ljouwert/Leeuwarden. His research focuses on language contact and language conflict, with particular attention to the situation of language minorities in Europe. He is coeditor-in-chief of the series Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft/Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science [HSK, De Gruyter] and of the journal Sociolinguistica. Nadine Di Vito was until recently Senior Instructional Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the application of sociolinguistic and sociocultural research to second language acquisition and teaching. She is co-author of a beginning- and intermediate-level French language method, Comme on dit (2018) and C’est ce qu’on dit (2019), based in 150 hours of recordings of over 100 native French speakers. Her xvi
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book, Patterns Across Spoken and Written French: Empirical Research on the Interaction Among Forms, Functions, and Genres (1997), examines the frequency and contextual use of particular grammatical structures in a variety of spoken and written genres reflective of the standard language. Manuel Díaz-Campos is Professor of Hispanic Sociolinguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He has published on the acquisition of sociolinguistic variables in L1, sociolinguistic variation including phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena, acquisition of second language phonology, lexical frequency trends, and topics in Spanish laboratory phonology. His research appears in notable journals, such as Language in Society, Probus, Lingua, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition, among others. He is the editor of The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics (2011), Aspects of Latin American Spanish Dialectology: In Honor of Terrell A. Morgan (2021), The Routledge Handbook of Variationist Approaches to Spanish (2022), and the Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics (2023), as well as the author of Introducción a la Sociolingüística Hispánica (2014). Mark Donohue is a senior director at The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. He has previously held positions at universities in Australia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, and has conducted fieldwork in Indonesia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Nepal, Bhutan, and China, publishing in a wide range of venues. In addition to purely linguistic work, he has collaborated with archaeologists, anthropologists, and human geneticists to better understand local and regional histories. His research interests include variation in language at both local and global scales, as well as basic linguistic description and linguistic theory (phonology and syntax). Sender Dovchin (Associate Professor) is Director of Research and Principal Research Fellow in the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia. She is also a Discovery Early Career Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council. Previously, she was Associate Professor at the University of Aizu, Japan, and was awarded Young Scientist (Kakenhi) by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Dr. Dovchin is Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. She was identified as “Top Researcher in the field of Language & Linguistics” under The Humanities, Arts & Literature of The Australian’s 2021 Research Magazine and Top 250 Researchers in Australia in 2021. She has authored numerous articles in international peer-reviewed journals and authored six books with international publishers such as Routledge, Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, and Multilingual Matters. Shayleen Macy EagleSpeaker (Wasco/Warm Springs/Yakima) is a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. She received her master of arts in language teaching studies from the University of Oregon in 2017. She is a heritage learner and language revitalization practitioner and studies the Kiksht and Ichishkíin/Íchishkin languages of her heritage. In her current research, she is developing indigenous methodologies towards the semantic and historical-sociolinguistic analysis of archival language materials for the Kiksht language. John Edwards was born in England, educated there and in Canada, and received his PhD from McGill University. He is Senior Research Professor at St. Francis Xavier University (Antigonish); Adjunct Professor, Graduate Studies, at Dalhousie University (Halifax); and Honorary Professor, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His main research interest is with the establishment, maintenance, and continuity of group identity, with particular reference to language in both its communicative and symbolic aspects. His recent books include Challenges in the Social Life of Language (Palgrave-Macmillan, xvii
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2011), Sociolinguistics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013), and Multilingualism: Understanding Linguistic Diversity (2nd edition, Bloomsbury, 2022). Edwards is a fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Royal Society of Canada. Sibonile E. Ellece is a senior lecturer in the Department of English, University of Botswana. She specializes in critical discourse analysis, and gender and language, and her main research focus is on the intersections of language and gender, sexuality, marriage, and related cultural practices. She is the coordinator of Graduate Studies in the department of English. She has authored several articles and book chapters, co-edited Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa (John Benjamins), with Lilian Atanga, Jane Sunderland, and Lia Litosseliti; Mapping Africa in the English-Speaking World (Cambridge Scholars), with Monaka, Seda, and McAllister; and co-authored Key Terms in Discourse Analysis (Continuum/Bloomsbury) with Paul Baker. She is also a member of the editorial boards of several international journals. Işıl Erduyan is Assistant Professor at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, in the Department of Foreign Language Education, where she has been working since completing her doctorate in second language acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include linguistic ethnographic approaches to multilingualism, urban multilingualism, and linguistic identity processes. In addition to her several articles published in peer-reviewed journals, she is the author of a volume titled, Multilingual Construction of Identity: German-Turkish Adolescents at School, based on her doctoral work, and is in the process of writing another volume based on her project “Contemporary Linguistic Diversity in İstanbul”. Joseph T. Farquharson is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at The University of the West Indies, Mona, and Coordinator of the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU). He served as the publications officer of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics (SCL) and is the managing editor of SCL’s openaccess book series “Studies in Caribbean Languages”. He has published on language and music, language and migration, etymology, and word formation. José Antonio Flores Farfán holds a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Amsterdam. He is a research professor at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), where he currently coordinates the digital collection of Indigenous languages and the project “Languagec revitalization through the arts”. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the National System of Researchers and Linguapax delegate in Latin America. For more than three decades he has worked on the design, publication, and dissemination of materials in native languages, with a participatory, multimodal, multilingual, and multipurpose approach with a notable contribution to the strengthening of threatened languages and cultures, as well as to the empowerment of their speakers. His professional interests include language contact and critical sociolinguistics, language policy, and planning, especially the field of language revitalization. Diana Forker is Professor of Caucasus Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Her work focuses on Caucasian languages from a functional-typological perspective, morphosyntax, language contact, and sociolinguistics. Before joining the Department of Caucasus Studies she held positions at the University of Bamberg, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and a fellowship of the Humboldt Foundation at James Cook University, Australia. Her latest publication is a A Grammar of Sanzhi Dargwa, with Language Science Press (2020). Together with Oleg Belyaev and a team of experts, she is building an electronic lexical database of xviii
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Caucasian languages (LexCauc). She is also leading the project “Resilience in the South Caucasus: prospects and challenges of a new EU foreign policy concept” (Jena-Cauc). Victor Friedman is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and Honorary Adjunct at La Trobe University. He is a foreign member of three national academies of sciences (Albania, Kosovo, RN Macedonia), and he has received the Annual Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship from both the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (2009) and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2014). Among his publications are Očerki laksogo jazyka (2011, Maxachkala: RAN) and the outline of Lak in The Oxford Handbook of the Languages of the Caucasus (2020). His main research interests are all linguistic aspects relating to languages of the Balkans and the Caucasus. Natalia Ganuza is Professor of Swedish, with a focus on sociolinguistics, at Uppsala University in Sweden. She received a PhD in bilingualism from the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at Stockholm University in 2008. Her research interests include multilingualism, language education policy, and sociolinguistic variation among youths in multilingual settings. She has had a longstanding interest and engagement in the provision of so-called mother-tongue tuition and Swedish as a second language in the Swedish context. Marie-Aimée Germanos holds a PhD from the Université de Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle, and is currently Associate Professor (maître de conférences) at the Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris. Her fields of interest include sociolinguistics and dialectology, pragmatics, and Lebanese Arabic. She has published research on language contact, variation and change in Beirut, on deixis and discourse markers in Lebanese Arabic, as well as on short-term accommodation in interdialectal conversation. She is furthermore interested in style and contextual variation and in language attitudes. Peter Gilles is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Humanities at the University of Luxembourg since 2006. His main focus in research and teaching is the (socio)linguistics of Luxembourgish. His research topics include phonetics/phonology, morphology, dialectology, variational linguistics, language history, and language technology. Based on a large-scale crowd-sourced language survey, he is currently preparing an “Atlas of Language Variation in Luxembourgish”. Sarah Grech is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics with the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology at L-Università ta’ Malta. Her main research and publications have focused on language variation in Maltese English, and sociophonetic studies on Maltese and Maltese English. Her current research investigates perceptions of Maltese English by its native speakers, in relation to which linguistic features of this variety can be considered socially meaningful. Funded projects have concentrated on building and annotating corpora of spoken Maltese English, with a view to furthering best practice in automating speech-to-text processes for lesser-known varieties and languages. Robert Greenberg is currently serving as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Auckland. He has held positions previously at Hunter College of the City University of New York, Yale University, Georgetown University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a specialist in South Slavic languages and linguistics and has worked primarily on sociolinguistic issues in the former Yugoslavia. His publications include numerous books and articles on South Slavic and Balkan Slavic topics. His book Language and Identity in xix
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the Balkans (Oxford University Press, 2004, second revised and expanded edition, 2008) received an award in 2005 for the best book in Slavic linguistics from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. In 2010, he was the recipient of the William Clyde DeVane medal for excellence in teaching and scholarship at Yale University. Jaeci Nel Hall began learning her ancestral language, Nuu-wee-ya’, in 2002. This language is an awakening Dene language from Southwest Oregon. Her journey with this language has inspired her to finish her doctorate in linguistics from the University of Oregon, where she researched how to extract grammatical information from archival resources for the purpose of supporting language use. She is currently Tribal Language Coordinator for the Coquille Indian Tribe where she supports their two tribal languages: Nuu-wee-ya’ and Miluk. Her primary inspiration for language learning has been her family, from learning with her father to using it with her children. Rosemary Hall is Research Assistant for the Dialect and Heritage Project at the University of Leeds, and World Englishes researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary. She completed her PhD at the University of Oxford, and has previously held positions at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Queen Mary, University of London. She grew up in Bermuda and now lives in Oxford. Jennifer Hay is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, and Director of the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour. She has broad research interests spanning New Zealand English, sociophonetics, laboratory phonology, and lexical representation, and she has published widely in these areas. Her work on New Zealand English includes co-authorship of two books – New Zealand English: Its Origins and Evolution (CUP) and New Zealand English (EUP). She has previously served as editor of Morphology, and associate editor of Journal of Phonetics, and Language, and she is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Kirk Hazen is Professor of Linguistics and Benedum Distinguished Scholar in the Department of English at West Virginia University. Hazen is a scholar of dialects, specifically social varieties in the US South and Appalachia, where he has conducted research since 1993. As founding director of the West Virginia Dialect Project, he has guided undergraduates through the research enterprise with funding from both the NSF and the NEH, earning WVU’s top undergraduate research mentoring award. Hazen is the author/editor of five books, most recently An Introduction to Language (Wiley, 2015) and Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century (WVU Press, 2020). Hannah Hedegard is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her current research foci are (1) language variation and change in World Englishes and (2) applications of sociolinguistics in legal contexts, principally Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO). Hannah has variationist and ethnographic fieldwork experience in several remote Anglophone islands around the world, including the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Guam, and the Falkland Islands, in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans, respectively. Raymond Hickey is Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick and former Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His research centers around varieties of English, especially Irish English, eighteenth-century English and issues of standardization of English, language contact and areal linguistics, as well as sociolinguistic variation and change. Among his recent book publications are Listening to the Past, Audio Records of Accents of English. (Cambridge University Press, 2017), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (Cambridge xx
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University Press, 2017), English in the German-speaking World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), English in Multilingual South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Handbook of Language Contact (Wiley, 2020), and Sound of English World-Wide (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022). Christina Higgins is Professor and Chair in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and she is Editor-in-Chief of Applied Linguistics. She is a sociolinguist who investigates multilingualism from a discursive perspective, drawing on social constructionist, semiotic, critical, and postmodern frameworks. Much of her research has been conducted in postcolonial contexts, including Tanzania and Hawaiʻi. She has examined the expression of different world views in public health communication, linguistic hybridity in everyday conversation and in the media, language learning and identity among transnationals, and the shifting nature of the value of languages in linguistic landscapes. Her books include English as a Local Language: Postcolonial Identities and Multilingual Practices (2009, Multilingual Matters), Language and HIV/ AIDS (2010, Multilingual Matters), and Diversifying Family Language Policy (2021, Bloomsbury). Gabrielle Hogan-Brun is Visiting Professor and Senior Researcher at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. She previously held positions at the Universities of Bristol and Basel. She has published widely on language policy, practice, and economic aspects of language in multilingual settings. She serves on several international journal editorial boards and has worked with various European organizations on matters of language diversity. A Salzburg Global Fellow, she is a co-author of the Salzburg Statement for a Multilingual World. She is author of the book Linguanomics: What Is the Market Potential of Multilingualism?, has recently co-edited the prizewinning Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, and is founding book series editor of Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. Nicole Holliday is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Pomona College in Claremont, California, USA. She received her PhD in linguistics from New York University in 2016, where she wrote a dissertation entitled “Intonational Variation, Linguistic Style and the Black/Biracial Experience”. Her research focuses on what it means to sound black, both phonetically and socially, and from the perspectives of speakers and listeners, both human and computational. Her work has appeared in scholarly venues such as Journal of Sociolinguistics, Laboratory Phonology, and American Speech. She has made media appearances in outlets such as the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Washington Post. Philippe Humbert is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Multilingualism of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). He has written a dissertation on the politics of the quantification of languages and linguistic varieties in Switzerland. He has also published various articles around that topic. His current research focuses on the scientific and political debate on the documentation of French language and “francophones” in the world. His main research interests are the history and politics of language documentation in globalized contexts; foreign language teaching policies and multilingualism; interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, ethnography, and historiography. Olga Ivanova is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Salamanca and a member of the research group on neurophysiology, cognition, and behavior at the Institute of Neurosciences of Castile-Leon, both in Spain. She has participated in several research projects dedicated to different aspects of sociolinguistics of bilingualism and language acquisition, language teaching xxi
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(with special focus on immigrants), psycholinguistics and language variation, and, particularly, language and speech disorders. She has primarily published in sociolinguistics of Ukraine, heritage languages transmission, discourse analysis, experimental pragmatics, and language changes and disorders in aging and speakers with dementia. She is particularly interested in sociolinguistic variation during the lifespan and in language disorders. She currently lives and works in Spain. Hyeon-Seok Kang is a professor in the English department at Dankook University in South Korea. He received a PhD in linguistics from the Ohio State University. His research interests include sociolinguistic variations in Korean English and Korean dialects, World Englishes, and language policies on the Korean Peninsula. He served as the president of the Sociolinguistic Society of Korea in 2013 and 2014. His publications include those articles in English Today, Language and Speech, BLS, CLS, etc. He was the chief editor of the Korean Dictionary of Sociolinguistics, published by the Sociolinguistic Society of Korea (2012). Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak is an associate professor in the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She has done research and lectured internationally on social dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, as well as language and gender issues. She has published chapters in Wiley-Blackwell handbooks. She recently co-edited (with M. Wrembel and P. Gąsiorowski) Approaches to the Study of Sound Structure and Speech: Interdisciplinary Work in Honour of Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk (Routledge 2020). Her current research interests focus on life-span sociolinguistics, the discourse of aging and intergenerational communication. In 2021, she designed and currently coordinates an MA studies teaching program on Language and Communication in Healthcare. Miklós Kontra is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Hungarian Linguistics at Károli Gáspár University, Budapest, Hungary. Between 1985 and 2010 he was Head of the Department of Sociolinguistics in the Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has published widely on variation in Hungarian; the contact varieties of Hungarian in Slovakia, Ukraine, Rumania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria; Hungarian–American bilingualism, language, and education; and linguistic human rights. His most recent book, co-edited with Anna Borbély, is Tanulmányok a budapesti beszédről a Budapesti Szociolingvisztikai Interjú alapján [Studies on Budapest Speech Based on the Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview Project], Gondolat Kiadó (2021). Shulamith Kopeliovich (PhD) teaches educational linguistics and language development at Herzog Academic College (Israel). Her primary research interests include translanguaging, meta-linguistic awareness, raising multilingual children, family language policy, heritage languages, as well as teaching English for global communication and professional growth. Her recent action research projects focus on teaching different fields of linguistics to pre-service English teachers. Margaret Maclagan (PhD) is a retired professor in the School of Psychology, Speech and Hearing at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. She is a member of the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour, and a life member of the New Zealand Speech Language-therapists’ Association. Before her retirement she taught language acquisition and language analysis, including phonetic analysis, to speech-language pathology students. Her research interests and publications include sound change over time in New Zealand English and in te reo Māori, and language change over time in people living with dementia. xxii
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Luisa Martín Rojo is Professor in Linguistics at the Universidad Autónoma (Madrid, Spain), and Principal Researcher of the Research Centre, MIRCO (Multilingualism, Discourse and Communication). She has conducted research in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and communication, mainly focused on immigration and racism. She has been former President of the Iberian Association for Studies on Discourse and Society (EDiSo). Currently, she is also a member of the European Science Foundation evaluation committee, and of the editorial boards of the journals Discourse & Society, Critical Discourse Studies, International Journal of Sociology of Language, Linguistic Landscapes, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, etc. Natalia Meir is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where she also serves as a coordinator for the Linguistics in Clinical Research Program. Her research focuses on heritage language development and maintenance across the lifespan with a goal to better understand which linguistic and extra-linguistic factors shape child and adult heritage language grammars. Meir’s research has been funded by the Israel Science Foundation, the German-Israel Research Foundation, and the National Institute of Psychobiology in Israel. Chiara Meluzzi is Senior Researcher in Linguistics at the University of Milan “La Statale”, where she teaches general linguistics for the BA in liberal studies in communication. Her research focuses on sociophonetics of Italian, forensic linguistics, and phonetics, together with the clinical applications of phonetic research. She is Associate Editor of the journal Estudios de Fonética Experimental and of the Peter Lang book series Language and Forensics. Ronald Beline Mendes graduated in French and Portuguese at the Universidade de São Paulo (1996). He received his master’s (1999) and doctor’s degree (2005) from Universidade Estadual de Campinas. He was also a graduate student, during his PhD course, at New York University (USA) and York University (Canada). He’s an associate faculty member of the Department of Linguistics at USP. He’s an experienced researcher in sociolinguistics, focusing mainly on the social meanings of language variation. His current main research project, funded by CNPq (Grant n. 313906/2018–1), focuses on sociolinguistic perception and the combination of multiple variables in the construction of styles. He co-edited, with Erez Levon (University of Bern), Language, Sexuality and Power: Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics, published by Oxford University Press (2015). Rajend Mesthrie is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. He was head of the Linguistics Section (1998–2009), and currently holds an NRF research chair in migration, language, and social change. He was President of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa (2002–2009) and President of the International Congress of Linguists (2013–2018). Among his book publications are Language in Indenture: a Sociolinguistic History of Bhojpuri-Hindi in South Africa (reprint ed. 2019), Language in South Africa (ed., CUP 2002), and Youth Language Practices & Urban Language Contact in Africa (ed., with Ellen Hurst-Harosh and Heather Brookes, CUP, 2021). He is an elected honorary life member of the South African Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Society and the Linguistic Society of America. Bettina Migge is Professor of Linguistics at University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland and a member of SeDyL, France. She previously taught in Germany and served as Head of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at UCD. She is Co-editor of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole xxiii
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Languages and was President of the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. Her publications treat topics such as sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, language contact, experiences of migration, and postcolonial pragmatics, focusing on the Creoles of Suriname and French Guiana, and language in Ireland. She is co-author of the collection Pidgins and Creoles: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (Routledge). She participates in the COST action LITHME, which explores language in the era of machine-generated language use. Catherine Miller is Senior Researcher at the French National Research Council (IREMAM, CNRS-Aix Marseille University). She specializes in Arabic sociolinguistics, and has done extensive field work research in Sudan (North and South), Egypt, and Morocco on issues pertaining to the spread of Arabic, urbanization, dialect contact, language change and variation, linguistic policies and linguistic activism, media, and cultural studies. She has edited or co-edited several books and thematic issues of academic journals and published more than 100 articles or chapters. Panchanan Mohanty is currently Professor in the School of Languages and Literature (Humanities) at Nalanda University, India. He has written and edited 33 books besides translating 4 books to Oriya. He has published more than 165 papers in journals like General Linguistics, Language Policy, Language Problems and Language Planning, Journal of Professional and Academic English, Mother Tongue, Glottometrics, Indian Linguistics, International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, Journal of Language and Culture, and Translation Today, etc. and in different anthologies. He was President of the Linguistic Society of India, President of the Dravidian Linguistics Association, Chief Editor of Indian Linguistics, Deputy Editor of International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics. He is editorial board member of The Endangered Language Yearbook, The Papers of Moscow State University (Oriental Studies), The Asian ESP Journal, Translation Today. He is a Governing Council member of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Ministry of Education, Govt. of India. Susanne Mohr is Professor of English Sociolinguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. She previously held positions in Germany and South Africa. Working on mouth actions in Irish Sign Language, she obtained her PhD, and subsequently a German postdoctoral degree, for her research on pluralization and countability in African varieties of English. Her postdoctoral thesis was published as Nominal Pluralization and Countability in African Varieties of English (2022) with Routledge. She is on the editorial board of Scandinavian Studies in Language and has acted as guest editor for special issues and edited volumes, e.g., for Sociolinguistic Studies and De Gruyter’s Anthropological Linguistics series. She has published widely on multilingualism, language contact, multimodality, and linguistic typology. She mentors first-generation academics and actively promotes equal chances for them. Jiří Nekvapil is Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His research has been influenced by poststructuralist linguistics and ethnomethodology. His specific scientific interests include language management theory, ethnomethodologically informed analysis of media discourse, and the use of languages in multinational companies. His most recent books are Dialogical Networks: Using the Past in Contemporary Research (Routledge 2022, co-authored with Ivan Leudar) and Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City: Postmodern Individuals in Urban Communicative Settings (Routledge 2022, co-edited with Dick Smakman and Kapitolina Fedorova). Sally Akevai Nicholas is a member of the Ngāti Teꞌakatauira people of Maꞌuke (Cook Islands/ ꞌAvaiki Nui). She is Senior Lecturer in Māori Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of xxiv
Contributors
Auckland), New Zealand. Her research focuses on the description, documentation, sociolinguistics, and revitalization of Cook Islands Māori and New Zealand Māori, along with matters of linguistic justice, and language revitalization more broadly. Ake has a particular interest in how young people can be encouraged to learn and use their ancestral languages. Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin is Established Professor of Modern Irish at the University of Galway, Ireland. Before joining Galway, he held positions and studied at other universities in Ireland, Brittany, and the Netherlands. He specializes in the sociolinguistics of the Gaelic languages in particular, from both societal and linguistic perspectives, having completed field-based research in Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Canada, and has also published on Breton and other minoritized languages. Among his works as author and editor are two Irish language handbooks of sociolinguistics, An tSochtheangeolaíocht: Feidhm agus Tuairisc (2012) and An tSochtheangeolaíocht: Taighde agus Gníomh (2019). Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana. The Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana (www.ti.ch/olsi) conducts research into the linguistics and sociolinguistics of Italian, especially in the multilingual context of Switzerland. Currently, the institute is composed of three researchers: Laura Baranzini, Matteo Casoni, and Sabine Christopher. Laura Baranzini’s research interests are the sociolinguistics of Italian, TAM-E domain and semantics-pragmatics of Italian temporal expressions in general, contrastive French-Italian linguistics, and pragmatics of implicit communication. Matteo Casoni’s research interest and publications concern sociolinguistics of Italian in Switzerland, contact linguistics (Italian-dialect contact), computer-mediated communication (CMC), and languages in the web and corporate communication. Sabine Christopher’s research and publications focus on institutional multilingualism, sociolinguistics, language teaching and multilingual didactics, language policy and planning, and discourse analysis. Gabriela Pérez Báez is an academic expert on indigenous languages and language revitalization. At the University of Oregon, she is an associate professor of linguistics. She is the director of the Language Revitalization Lab and co-director of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages. Gabriela served as curator of linguistics at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and in its Recovering Voices initiative. Her research centers on revitalization practices around the world. In her native Mexico, Gabriela works with Zapotec communities, and has published on migration and language vitality, verbal inflection and derivation, semantic typology, and language and cognition. Gabriela is the compiler of two dictionaries of Isthmus Zapotec within a participatory and interdisciplinary model. She holds a doctorate in linguistics from the University at Buffalo. Falco Pfalzgraf is Reader/Associate Professor in German Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He is a sociolinguist specializing in linguistic purism, and has published widely in this area. He is the convenor of the Language and Linguistics Section at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, and he chairs the London/UK branch of the Association for the German Language “Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache”. For more detailed information, see . xxv
Contributors
Alexandra Guedes Pinto is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Arts Faculty of University of Porto (FLUP). She is the director of the bachelor’s degree in language sciences, and the president of the board of the R&D Unit Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto (CLUP). She is the founder and main organizer, since 2011, of JADIS (Annual International Conferences on Discourse Analysis) and founder and editor in chief of REDIS (Journal of Discourse Studies by CLUP/FLUP). She is also the author of several works in national and international publications on discourse studies, having focused on aspects of the discursive functioning of media, political, scientific, and juridical discourse. Matthew Pollock is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Louisiana State University, Shreveport, USA. As research assistant to Dr. Manuel Díaz-Campos at Indiana University, he has assisted in developing and editing three volumes: Aspects of Latin American Spanish Dialectology (John Benjamins, 2021), The Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics (Wiley, 2023), and the Enciclopedia Concisa de los Dialectos del Español (Wiley-Blackwell, 2024). He has been published in John Benjamins’ Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, and journals including Hispania and Language and Communication. His interests include sociophonetic variation, style-shifting, frequency effects, L2 phonetic acquisition, and third-wave sociolinguistic methodologies involving speaker identity, agency, and stance. He currently lives in Shreveport, Louisiana with his wife and son. Tatiana Popova is a postgraduate student in the Russian Language Department of the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University. Her dissertation is devoted to the analysis of the social roles of the speaker in the gender aspect. In particular, the features of building communication are considered from the point of view of existing gender stereotypes. The material of the “One Day of Speech” corpus is analyzed using the methods of pragmatic annotation and conversation analysis. Gabriela Prego is Profesor Titular (Associate Professor) of General Linguistics at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. She has been coordinator of the Máster de Estudios Lingüísticos (USC) and Máster Interuniversitario de Lingüística Aplicada (USC, UDC y UVigo). She has been Vice President and vocal of Discourse and Social Justice of the executive board of the International Association of Discourse and Society Studies (EDISO). She also co-coordinated the Discourse Observatory, and she has participated in this Observation from its creation. Her fields of study are critical sociolinguistic ethnography, multilingualism, and language education, and she has also worked on the study of the socio-pragmatic dimension of child language. She has published the results of her investigations in several national and international conferences, books, and specialized journals. Christoph Purschke is Associate Professor in Computational Linguistics and Head of the Culture and Computation Lab at the University of Luxembourg. He is a sociolinguist with a background in dialectology and a vivid interest in methodology. In his work he combines different disciplines and approaches to the analysis of language as a cultural phenomenon, including the study of sociolinguistic issues (multilingualism, attitudes, discourse), technical approaches to data collection and processing (citizen science, computational sociolinguistics), and developing theories for the analysis of cultural practice. In his doctoral thesis Regionalsprache und Hörerurteil (2011), he demonstrated the fundamental importance of perception and evaluation for variation and change in the German regional languages. xxvi
Contributors
Viviana Quintero is a researcher focusing on the semiotics of language ideologies in languageshifting indigenous speech communities and the interdiscursive construction of indigeneities. She received a BA from Brown University in American studies, and earned an MA and PhD candidacy in anthropology from the University of Michigan. She is presently working on research articles and essays based on her linguistic anthropological field research in highland Ecuador. Yolandi Ribbens-Klein is currently a research officer in acoustic sociophonetics within Professor Mesthrie’s SARChI Research Chair at the University of Cape Town, after spending two years in a postdoctoral position at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. She has worked on diverse sociolinguistic research projects; the majority of these studies focus on language variation and change in varieties of Afrikaans and South African English. She is specifically interested in the intersection of sociophonetic variation with embodied performances of identities, ideologies, and senses of place and belonging in multilingual societies. Eleanor Ridge is a lecturer in linguistics at Massey University in Manawatū, New Zealand. She works on documentation of the Vatlongos language of Southeast Ambrym, Vanuatu, focusing on the morphology and syntax of verbs and clauses, variation in language use between rural and urban communities, and language contact within the broader multilingual context of Vanuatu. Her current research investigates young people’s language use in Vatlongos communities. Shobha Satyanath is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Delhi. She previously taught at the Central University of Assam, Silchar. She is the co-founder of the conference series, NWAV Asia-Pacific. She is the chief editor of Asia-Pacific Language Variation. She is also a board member of the Journal of Sociolinguistics as well as an academic book series. She is interested in the sociolinguistics of the multicultural societies of India, which translates into her teaching and research. Additionally, she has worked and published on an Anglophone Creole spoken in Guyana. She lives in Delhi (India). She also holds the position of vice president of the Linguistic Society of India. She has published articles and chapters in academic journals and book series. Stephan Schmid is a senior researcher and professor at the Phonetics Laboratory, Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, where he teaches linguistic phonetics and Romance linguistics. He previously worked as a research fellow at the Centro di dialettologia of the University of Padua (Italy) and as visiting professor at the Universities of Konstanz and Freiburg (Germany). His research interests are mainly in descriptive and contrastive linguistics, sociolinguistics and language contact, and bilingualism and second language acquisition. He has published widely in journal and book form on phonetics, sociolinguistics, and dialectology especially in the Swiss context. Daniel Schreier is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests include English sociolinguistics, varieties of English around the world, language variation and change, and contact linguistics. He has written several books on English in the South Atlantic, published in international journals such as English World-Wide, Language Variation and Change, Diachronica, American Speech, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language in Society, and the Journal of English Linguistics and contributed chapters to half a dozen handbooks and a dozen edited volumes. Most recently, he is co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes and English and Spanish: World Languages in Interaction (Cambridge University Press). From 2013 to 2019, he served as co-editor for English World-Wide: A Journal of Varieties of English. xxvii
Contributors
Tatiana Sherstinova is Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics and program academic supervisor in philology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and senior researcher in computational linguistics at St. Petersburg State University, both in St. Petersburg, Russia. She previously was a visiting professor in St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University, State University of Aviation Instrumentation (GUAP), and Baltic State Technical University VOENMEH. She is a known specialist in corpus linguistics, and the developer of two famous linguistic resources – the ORD corpus of Russian everyday speech and the Corpus of Russian Short Stories of 1900–1930. She has published widely in corpus linguistics, Russian phonetics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, and digital humanities. She currently lives in St. Petersburg, Russia. Bolormaa Shinjee is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia. Previously, she worked as a senior lecturer at the National University of Mongolia. She obtained her master’s degree in TESOL from Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. Her main research interests include sociolinguistics of globalization, language policy, and translanguaging. Ruth Singer is a linguist who researches multilingual language practices in collaboration with the Warruwi Community, an Indigenous community of Arnhem land (Australia). She has a book on the topic published by Routledge in 2023 and has published in linguistics and anthropology journals on the topic. Ruth Singer also creates digital language resources with the Warruwi community, including producing films with young people and two dictionaries of Mawng. Her language documentation work has involved building archival collections of Mawng and other Indigenous languages of Warruwi in their multilingual context. She has published an earlier book on nominal classification and also writes about collaborative approaches to linguistic research with Indigenous communities. Ruth Singer is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Marián Sloboda teaches Slovak linguistics and linguistic anthropology in the Department of Central European Studies at Charles University, Prague, Czechia. His research focuses on societal multilingualism, linguistic landscapes, and language management. He has co-edited The Language Management Approach (with Lisa Fairbrother and Jiří Nekvapil, Peter Lang, 2018) and Sociolinguistic Transition in Former Eastern Bloc Countries (with Petteri Laihonen and Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Peter Lang, 2016). His most recent work includes a contribution to Multilingualism in Public Spaces: Empowering and Transforming Communities (ed. by Robert Blackwood and Deirdre A. Dunlevy, Bloomsbury, 2021). Zorana Sokolovska, PhD, is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching at the University of Fribourg and the University of Teacher Education in Lucerne (Switzerland). After completing her Bachelor and Master studies at the University of Strasbourg (France), she enrolled in an international PhD program at the Universities of Strasbourg and Fribourg. Her research focuses on the study of languages in society and their role in social organization from a historiographic perspective. She published in several peer-reviewed journals on the topics of discourse construction and (re)production of ideologies and language ideological debates. She is author of the book Les langues en débats dans une Europe en projet published by ENS Editions (Lyon) in 2021. Rebecca Lurie Starr is an associate professor in the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 2012. Her work focuses on language variation and change and acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in multilingual and dialectally diverse settings. She has published xxviii
Contributors
work in Language in Society, Journal of Sociolinguistics, World Englishes, and Journal of Chinese Linguistics, among other venues. Her 2017 book Sociolinguistic Variation and Acquisition in Two-way Language Immersion: Negotiating the Standard was published by Multilingual Matters. Andrea Sudbury completed a PhD in 2000 at the University of Essex on dialect contact and formation in the Falkland Islands. She spent two years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, working on the ONZE corpus of data. She is a co-author of New Zealand English: Its Origins and Evolution (2004) and has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on English in the Southern Hemisphere. She is an associate researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Society, University of Bern. Rada Tirvassen, a Mauritian national, is Emeritus Professor at the University of Pretoria. He has undertaken research on Mauritius and more broadly on the South West Indian Ocean Islands. In his studies, he adopts both a sociolinguistic and a psycholinguistic perspective. Anna Tudela is a lecturer of Spanish at the Open University, in the UK, and holds a PhD in linguistic communication and multilingual mediation from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She previously held positions in China and Spain. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and Catalan as a foreign language. Irina Turner has been Academic Counselor to the chair of African Linguistics and a member of the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple at the University of Bayreuth. Her research interests are situated at the intersection of cultural and media studies, political communication, and sociology of language; a focus is on multi- and translingual communication practices in South Africa. Currently, she works on the effects of decolonization and digitalization on isiXhosa. In 2020, she coedited the volume Decolonization of Higher Education in Africa (Routledge). Jill Vaughan is a sociolinguist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses currently on the sociolinguistics of multilingualism and has involved work on Australian Indigenous languages of northern Australia, the Irish language in the diaspora, online language use, and variation in Australian English. Since 2014, she has worked with community members in the Maningrida region of Arnhem Land documenting local languages and conducting sociolinguistic research. Jill is a co-founder of the Linguistics Roadshow. Joel Walters is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University. His research on bilingualism investigates sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of language minorities in Israel. It has been funded by the Israel Science Foundation, the Israeli Ministry of Education, the GermanIsrael Research Foundation, and BMBF (German Ministry of Education). A current project investigates narrative intervention with bilingual pre-school children. He is Chair of the MEd program in Teaching English as an International Language at Talpiot College of Education. Gillian Wigglesworth is Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. She is a chief investigator and leader of the Melbourne node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She has an extensive background in first and second language acquisition and bilingualism, as well as language assessment. Her major research focus is on the multilingual communities in which Indigenous children in remote areas of Australia grow up, the languages they acquired as their first languages, and how these interact with English once they attend school. xxix
Contributors
Dafna Yitzhaki is a lecturer at Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel-Aviv, Israel. She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics. Her research interests include multilingualism in education and teaching languages in the context of conflict. Her current research focuses on the implementation of the Northern Ireland Shared Education model in the Israeli context. Her recent book (2022) is Activist Pedagogy and Shared Education in Divided Societies: International Perspectives and Next Practices, co-edited with Gallagher, Aloni, and Gross and published by Brill. David Zeitlyn is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural anthropology, University of Oxford. Before that he taught at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, for many years. His research has concentrated on the Mambila of Cameroon (but also including the Nigerian populations). He has used models taken from conversation analysis to make sense of the interactions in spider divination (a monograph on this appeared in 2020 Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers). He has looked at how families talk while preparing food, using naturally occurring data to examine person reference and deixis (see 2005 monograph Words and Processes in Mambila Kinship: The Theoretical Importance of the Complexity of Everyday Life). With Bruce Connell he has also worked on endangered languages on the Cameroon Nigerian borderlands and considered complicated, fractal histories, including linguistic histories, and how these interact with other types of history. Minglang Zhou is Professor of Chinese at the University of Maryland, College Park. His teaching and research interests include the sociology of language, language and ethnicity, bilingual education, and Chinese as a second language. He authored Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reform for Minority Languages 1949–2002 (Mouton de Gruyter, 2003) and Language Ideology and Order in Rising China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and edited or co-edited six volumes on language policy, bilingual education, and language contact in China and Asia. He also published dozens of research articles and book chapters on these topics.
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FIGURES
7.1 Rates of standard (NP-agr) CNp and of [ejn] in every ten-minute interval throughout the interview with Carlos 7.2 Occurrences of CNp and [ejn] throughout the interview with Carlos 7.3 Clustering of CNp and [ejn] in the 10- to 20-minute interval of the interview with Carlos 26.1 Languages and locations referred to in this chapter 29.1 Directions of language pressure and change 41.1 Dialect division in Ireland
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91 92 92 313 354 481
PREFACE
This second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World appears some dozen or more years after the first edition. The new edition sees the addition of two scholars to the editorial team: Professor Rajend Mesthrie (University of Cape Town) and Dr. Chiara Meluzzi (University of Milan). They join Professor Martin J. Ball (now of Bangor University and Wrexham Glyndŵr University, both in Wales). This larger editorial team has also been able to add considerably to the geographical and linguistic areas that we have been able to cover. In particular, some lacunae from the first edition have been filled with chapters on Korea, Mongolia, Hispanic South America, and Brazil, for example. Further, we have been able to sub-divide some areas into several chapters, such as South Asia, southern Africa (including a chapter on Lusophone Africa), the Arabic-speaking world, and parts of Europe (for example, having separate chapters for Spain and for Portugal, and an examination of the interesting multilingual case of Switzerland). Perhaps the main innovation in this new edition, however, is an increase in emphasis on the sociolinguistics of Indigenous languages. We have chapters reviewing sociolinguistic studies in the Indigenous languages of North America, South America, and Australia, and the chapters on Central America and on New Zealand highlight research on Indigenous languages there, too. Where possible, Indigenous scholars are members of the authorial teams for many of these chapters. The increase in chapter numbers from 33 to over 50 has also allowed a re-arrangement of the parts of the book. In the first edition, Africa and the Middle East were joined in a single part, but the increase in coverage of Africa and the separation of North Africa and the Middle East has meant that the chapters on Africa are now all together in a single part and Middle Eastern areas are situated within the Asia part. Sociolinguistics itself has moved on considerably over the last dozen or more years, and this is reflected in the contents of the chapters. As well as variationist sociolinguistics there is a growing interest in more macro concerns. For example, several chapters look in detail at work on contact varieties, often between indigenous and official languages; others look at research into multilingualism and the tension between sociolinguists on one hand and education and governmental authorities who may see multilingualism as a threat to nation cohesion on the other. At the other end of the scale are concerns over language loss and attempts to maintain minority languages through language planning and other means. We are confident that this collection will be a valuable resource for sociolinguistics interested in looking at research in all parts of the world, reviewed and presented by the leading scholars of their areas. xxxii
INTRODUCTION John Edwards
General remarks Comparing the 2010 edition of this Handbook to this new one, one finds that the original 33 chapters have now increased to 54, and that the geographical scope – already commendable – is now exceptionally far-reaching. The work is uniformly well written by a hundred capable authors, and the excellent bibliographies supporting the chapters will reveal many items that are at once important and unfamiliar. Reading all the contributions has constituted a very pleasurable course of instruction for me, as it no doubt will for many others. The book’s five sections deal with the Americas (in 10 chapters), Asia (14), Australasia (5), Africa (7) and Europe (18). The contributions range between 3,600 and 14,000 words, with an average length of about 6,200. The considerable variation in the number of chapters per section tells us more about available literatures and research sources than about linguistic richness. There are more European chapters, for instance, than there are African, Australasian and Asian ones, even though the several hundred varieties of Europe are dwarfed by more than 2,000 in each of the latter three. Nonetheless, I think that readers will find here one of the most comprehensive attempts to take such variations into account. In what follows, I touch upon some of the important themes found in the collection. Some are of primary interest because of their contextual specificity, others because they highlight issues common to many settings. The obvious example in the second category is, of course, the influence of English around the globe. Its scope and penetration continue apace, whether its contacts are with ‘small’ languages or with varieties that have some legislated status. Although there is much variationist material to be considered in this collection, and much of interest at finer-grained levels of discussion and analysis, I have largely restricted my comments to broader facets of the social life of language.
The Americas (10 chapters) The discussion of sociolinguistic research in the United States highlights most of the features central throughout the book. Notable categorisations here include regionalisms and dialects, sex and gender, age and class – and the reader is also alerted to different methodological approaches,
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-1
John Edwards
to many important linguistic variables (lexical, morphological, pragmatic and so on), and to the salience of perception and attitude in all studies of the sociology of language. The Canadian context, unlike that in other countries of the ‘new world’, uniquely involves two dominant language streams rather than a single one; both French and English imposed themselves on pre-existing languages and cultures and both influenced patterns and flows of more recent immigration. Given the complexities, official policies of bilingualism and multiculturalism continue to command considerable attention. The complementary coverage of North American indigenous varieties reveals a sad story of both forced assimilation and cultural neglect. Recent treatments of ‘voice appropriation’ are relevant here, and research with subaltern populations has often been conducted in insensitive and unethical ways, with unfavourable consequences for the informant populations. Some of the revival efforts now underway must therefore contend with histories of authoritarian pressures, to say nothing of the currently tiny numbers in some ‘first-nations’ communities. The chapter on Mexico shows that, as in North America, some of the indigenous varieties have been better studied than others. Both group size and historical centrality mean that the lingua francas of Meso-America (for instance) have received greater attention than ‘smaller’ varieties. Disparities here also remind us that there is a sociolinguistics of conflict within the overall indigenous population. Chapters on Central and South America continue the story of relationships between indigenous and colonial varieties, relationships that inevitably involve shift and loss, revitalisation efforts and group tensions. Possible and appropriate allocations of efforts and resources are also central. The authors remind us that revival efforts must draw on all the relevant and related disciplines and social contexts; focusing on language tout court is unlikely to prove useful, even in the medium term. Two chapters focus on Brazilian Portuguese and the several Spanishes of South America. The ‘social meaning of language variation’ and the value of ethnographic work in its study are emphasised in the first. Both chapters necessarily concern themselves, too, with the indigenous varieties with which the colonial languages have come into contact. Points are made about the paucity of work that interweaves languages, ideologies and attitudes with the formation and maintenance of group identities. The concluding chapters in this first part of the book take us to the Caribbean and to Atlantic Englishes. In the former context, Spanish is an important colonial language, but Dutch, English and French also figure here. A useful tabular presentation outlines groups, official languages and vernaculars among almost three dozen countries and regions. Creole varieties and code-switching are central to the discussion, and readers are reminded once more of linguistic fragility and marginalisation, and of insufficient and unequal research activity. Atlantic Englishes treated here include the Bermudian variety that draws upon both Caribbean and South Carolinian English. Tristan da Cunha, St Helena and the Falklands are also discussed in this chapter. Jack Chambers has called these islands the ‘sociolinguists’ Galapagos’ and they are largely – if unsurprisingly – overlooked in the sociolinguistic literature. None of these islands were populated before the early nineteenth century and, without pre-existing indigenous populations, we see examples here of colonial Englishes in tabula rasa contexts.
Asia (14 chapters) In the first chapter, we learn that China has recently become a ‘mammoth sociolinguistics lab’ because of globalisation – with the promotion of Chinese and the increasing influence of English – rapid urbanisation and great internal migration. Apart, then, from attention to English and Putonghua, there is a growing literature on smaller and endangered languages, although documentation has outstripped maintenance and revival efforts. 2
Introduction
South Asia is the focus of two chapters, the first dealing with the interplay among English and indigenous languages in Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The implications for group identity in regions where local vernaculars lack official or majority status are discussed here. In the second, Dravidian languages are the focus: spoken mainly in southern India, they are also found in five other countries. There are at least two dozen languages and many more dialects, different names for the same variety exist quite frequently, and there are problems of dialect vs language classification. While some Dravidian languages are now endangered, four of them (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu) are among the 22 recognised languages of India. There is also a chapter on the northern regions of South Asia. Here, TibetoBurman is found in northern India, as well as in neighbouring countries (and Burma), but only in Bhutan is a variety (Dzongkha) accorded official status. Tai languages are spoken in Burma, Assam and elsewhere. Nicobarese and Andamanese are also mentioned. They are indigenous to two archipelagos in the Indian Ocean (and, together, constitute a federally governed ‘union territory’ of India). The pre-contact languages of the northern Andamans are gone now but, in the south, several varieties remain – including Sentinelese, spoken on an island which is now a ‘closed reserve’. The Mongolian chapter reveals that, as in so many other regional contexts, English is increasingly important, and enthusiasm for local language diversity is tempered in some quarters by concerns about linguistic ‘purity’. Mongolian is now (officially) written in Russian Cyrillic script, but there is some beginning interest in re-introducing the traditional Uyghur. In Japan, considerations of a sociolinguistic (or sociology-of-language) nature have long been present. Often seen as ethnically and linguistically homogeneous, Japan has a language landscape more varied than many imagine. There are about three million foreigners, some small indigenous minority groups, and considerable labour in-migration. While proficiency in English is not widespread, its influence steadily increases, and it is interesting to note that, a century and a half ago, it was suggested as a country-wide lingua franca in the service of ‘national development’. The Korean chapter also describes a generally homogeneous society: all but about 5% of the population are ethnic Koreans, only Korean is official and there are virtually no minority-group languages. Nonetheless, the sociolinguistic scene is not without interest: English is widely taught (along with Chinese and Japanese), and there is ongoing research on the system of honorifics, on romanisation and on gender variations, as well with educational and discourse contexts. Also important are dialect variations, although work here is only now beginning to accumulate. Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam are the focus of a Southeast Asian chapter in which we read again of the multilingual nature of the populations and of the growth in English acquisition. Minority languages form a rich tapestry here. While Cambodia is the most homogeneous of the five countries, it still contains 20 minority groups in a population of about 17 million. There are more than twice as many such groups in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam . . . and Burma has perhaps 135. Within minority-language groups there are, of course, further dialectal subdivisions, and the ethnolinguistic picture is yet more complicated by the fact that the same group and the same language/dialect may have several different names – a phenomenon not unknown elsewhere. The complementary chapter on maritime regions concentrates on Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, the Philippines and Timor-Leste. (New Guinea is treated in a separate chapter.) Malay is central in all but the last two polities. Much of the rich linguistic diversity is under-researched, and most national policies grapple with the interaction between colonial and indigenous varieties, albeit in different ways. Minority languages are under threat, and we see shifts from ‘dialects’ to standards (to Mandarin, for instance). English is expanding, often in American forms, and there is a growth in local Englishes. 3
John Edwards
We now move north and west. The Turkic languages of Central Asia (and, of course, in Turkey and Cyprus) represent another under-researched context. Notable are written-language reforms that have come about with modernisation: replacement of the Arabic alphabet by the Latin was rapidly implemented in early 1929, and ‘purification’ efforts aimed at lessening the influence of Arabic and Persian on Turkish were set in train. The chapter on Iranian languages focuses on Dari, Tajik and Persian (aka Farsi), and reveals a diglossic relationship between the latter two that is not unlike that linking Demotic Greek and Katharevousa. Future developments in the romanisation of Persian script are also discussed. Studies of Arabic in the Middle East, often both recent and interrupted by political events, have centred upon dialectal contact and variation involving standard and nonstandard varieties, classical and vernacular Arabic. There is increasing acceptance of the latter, although this is mainly attitudinal in nature and is certainly not general across contexts. The Israeli chapter focuses on the rise of Hebrew and the increasing multilingualism of a region that has always been linguistically rich. Among the current population of about nine million, half have Hebrew as their native variety – the proportion is 20% for each of Arabic and Russian. (Only about 180,000 people now claim Yiddish as the mother tongue.) Bilingualism in education is a major focus – Hebrew-Arabic and Hebrew-Russian – although the school medium is usually Hebrew, and English is a required subject. The final chapter in the Asian section attends mainly to the South Caucasus (Transcaucasia) and the countries of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. Three important indigenous-language families are Kartvelian (the most significant of which is Georgian), Nakh-Daghestanian (Chechen) and Abkhaz-Adyge (Circassian). There is much dialectal variation, much interplay with Russian, and interesting alphabetic conventions that reflect political contexts and exigencies. The Northern Caucasus is entirely within Russia, and the dominant language policy involves increased Russification and steadily decreasing attention to minority languages. (For the separate chapter on Russia itself, see the Europe section.)
Australasia (5 chapters) The author of the first Australian chapter notes that attitudes towards the ‘broader’ versions of English there have become more favourable. Almost a quarter of the population (of some 25.5 million people) speaks a language other than English at home: significant varieties here are Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Punjabi, Greek, Tagalog and Italian. This list reveals the changing origins of immigrants to Australia, where restrictions on non-European settlers lasted in some quarters until the late 1970s. The second Australian contribution turns to the indigenous languages of the country. Prior to colonisation there were as many as 250 of these; now only about 15 are learned by children, and levels of indigenous-language retention are quite variable. Among the original inhabitants of the continent (now comprising about 3% of the total population), there seem to have been no widely spoken lingua francas. The chapter on New Zealand emphasises the Māori population. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, the proportion of children speaking only Māori fell from 97% to 26%. Virtually all Māori speakers are now bilingual and English monolingualism is the country-wide norm. Recent revival movements, however, have made it possible for children to receive all their education in Māori. There is a substantial Pacific-Islander population in New Zealand and, in a following chapter, its general distribution is discussed. The focus, then, is on Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia – including Vanuatu, Fiji and Nauru, as well as the Solomon and Marshall Islands. Contemporary efforts to support indigenous varieties in the face of historical European impositions remain difficult where the acquisition of English has become a priority. Of interest, once again, are problems exacerbated by concerns about language boundaries and mixing, ideologies of predominance and 4
Introduction
‘purity’, and choices among varieties. New Guinea is given a separate chapter because of its incredible language richness. The island has 0.2% of the world’s population and a similar proportion of its land area . . . but 18% of its languages, in at least 50 families. The size of the many language groups ranges from about 200,000 speakers to fewer than 40. Besides English and the other colonial overlays, there are two important pidgin/creole varieties, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu. The western half of the island is now part of Indonesia, where the official language is Bahasa Malay. The government of the eastern part – Papua New Guinea – recognises English and the two creoles: Tok Pisin is the general vernacular of the country.
Africa (7 chapters) Seven North African countries are the focus of the opening chapter in this section. Among a combined population of some 255 million, the issues of greatest sociolinguistic interest are the dominance of Arabic and varying levels of multilingualism. The colonial varieties – principally French and English, but also Spanish and Italian – also figure in the picture here. At the educational level, we note ongoing interplays between Arabic and French (or English), between Arabic and non-Arabic vernaculars, and between standard and colloquial varieties of Arabic itself. More than 20 countries in West and Central Africa constitute a region that contains 85% of all African languages (and about 25% of the global total), and that is characterised by widespread multilingualism and, unsurprisingly, important lingua francas. The small amount of research into language(s) ‘from any perspective’ has been reduced further because of political instability. Pressures on indigenous varieties continue to come from colonial impositions, but smaller ones are also over-shadowed by larger African languages and lingua francas. A third chapter turns to East Africa, where the levels of diversity vary considerably: Tanzania has about 120 languages, Eritrea about 15. As in other parts of the continent, there are rural-urban distinctions in language use and attitudes. Swahili has grown in importance as a regional lingua franca, often to the detriment of other languages – all of which, however, were the focus of the Asmara Declaration (in 2000), which supported the empowerment of African varieties as bases of de-colonisation, as mediums of education and as instruments of pan-African unity. Most of the research, and the thrust of most language policy, has to do with questions of languages at school. Portuguese is an official language in Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Equatorial Africa (with Spanish and French) and São Tomé and Príncipe. It remains the first language of many – 40% of the population in Angola, 50% in Mozambique, and virtually everyone in São Tomé and Príncipe. Eight countries are discussed in the chapter on Southern Africa. Among Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, English is the colonial language most frequently recognised as official, and it is increasingly dominant throughout the region (even in Madagascar, where French has official status). The colonial language in Namibia was German, but this has lost its once-legislated recognition. The country is also notable for the room it makes for indigenous languages in the classroom. In South Africa itself, there are eleven official varieties (soon to be joined by sign language). The most significant colonial-language interplay has been between Afrikaans (now the first language of about 14% of the population) and English (about 10%, and the main lingua franca of the country). Some 23% speak Zulu as their first language, and the figure for Xhosa is about 16%. As elsewhere, attempts are underway to support and enhance the status of indigenous languages. The African section concludes with some coverage of islands in the Indian Ocean. French is official in those treated here – the Comoros, Madagascar, Réunion, Mauritius and the Seychelles – and so is English in the last two. Work is being done on several creoles, as well as on Arabic and Comorian varieties in the Comoros, and Malagasy in Madagascar. 5
John Edwards
Europe (18 chapters) The first chapter is about German – official language in Austria, Liechtenstein and Germany, coofficial in Luxembourg and Switzerland, and regionally official in parts of Belgium and Italy. Dialect preferences and variations in the German of immigrants and guest-workers are important here. Dutch is official in Flanders, the Netherlands . . . and in Suriname (more than 500,000 speakers). It is not official in Frans-Vlaanderen (or Flandre française) but is spoken by perhaps as many as 90,000 people there. Again, variationist studies constitute the lion’s share of sociolinguistic research. In the Nordic area, Denmark and Iceland are very linguistically homogeneous, and only Danish and Icelandic, respectively, are official. Both Finnish and Swedish are official in Finland – founded, indeed, as a bilingual country – and three Sámi varieties are also recognised. Norway and Sweden also recognise Sámi. Research on the use of English, particularly in higher education, is notable here, and most regions now deal with the multiculturalism that comes with immigrants. Britain has no official language, but regional provisions are now made for Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. Even though it has many more speakers than Scottish Gaelic, Scots lacks official status; this is, in part, a reflection of its debated status (dialect or language). The next chapter considers the status of Irish and revival efforts in its behalf – but also Polish, which has about 120,000 speakers (four times the number of speakers of Irish as a first language). The very recent influx of Polish and other immigrants has occasioned real change in a country where the great majority have long been monolingually English for all practical purposes. Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton are the six extant Celtic languages: all are considered endangered, and all are now benefiting from attempts at revitalisation. The ‘new-speaker’ emphasis of recent years is particularly noteworthy here, as the number of native speakers, or those who learn in community contexts, continues to decline. Welsh and Breton are probably the strongest in terms of regular users, followed by Scottish Gaelic and Irish, and speakers of Manx and Cornish are few indeed. One consequence – important for all, but especially for the latter two – is that learning is now generally associated with conscious efforts to maintain particular group identities. Another is that discussions are not uncommon about the ‘legitimacy’ of emerging varieties vis-à-vis traditional usages. The French chapter highlights official attempts to stem, or at least regulate, the influx of English. Prescriptivism also applies where regional languages are concerned – particularly in education – although some two dozen varieties have regional recognition. In Italy, language contact involving Italian and Italo-Romance variants has occasioned much research. As elsewhere, the growth of English in higher education and science is a cause for concern. The Swiss context is well-known for having four national languages. The two most significant ones are German and French, and all four – including, that is, Italian and Romansh – show regional and dialectal variation. A notable example involves Swiss (Alemannic) German and a more standardised version of the language. French, German and Luxembourgish are official in Luxembourg, with the spoken and written fortunes of the last on the rise. It is the national language and a common vernacular. The multilingualism of the indigenous population is considerably heightened by the large number of foreign nationals living in the country. Perhaps of greatest interest in Spain is the increasing reversal of the restrictive language and dialectal policies of the Franco era, which means greater attention to Catalan, Basque, Galician, Andalusian and Valencian. Unlike most smaller languages elsewhere, both Basque and Catalan have significant urban centres: Bilbao and Barcelona. As with Spanish, the Portuguese context extends well beyond Europe, encompassing a great many speakers in South America. Attention to variations between European and Brazilian Portuguese is notable. All but a very few of the halfmillion inhabitants of Malta have Maltese as their first language, although it must increasingly 6
Introduction
contend with English (co-official) in the linguistic landscape and in writing. The country’s history and geography mean that Maltese (which uses the Latin alphabet) has elements of both Italian and Arabic. East Central Europe – between the eastern borders of Germany and those of the former Soviet Union – is the subject of a chapter focusing on Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic. Multilingualism has always been the norm in these regions, where changing political fortunes mean that many now live in countries outside their historical homelands. The next contribution is about the Balkans, with emphasis upon the former Yugoslavian republics, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania. A great deal of attention is focused in these regions on the role of language in nationalism. The author observes that ‘national boundaries inadequately correspond to the ethnic and linguistic boundaries’, which accounts, among other things, for ongoing efforts to make two languages out of Serbo-Croatian. These create a textbook example of nationalistic feelings trumping linguistic reality and pragmatic policy. Not all of the Balkan regions have adopted the European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages which aims to support ‘small’ varieties and, indeed, some have clearly assimilationist language policies. In Russia, much relatively recent work in sociolinguistics and the sociology of language has dealt with urban vernaculars, and with regional and literary standards. Historically, of course, varying policies of Russification have been subjects of interest, to say nothing of all the linguistic interactions within the former Soviet Union. The chapter on Ukraine attends mainly to the interplay between Ukrainian and Russian. Only a very few people do not understand either of those two languages but, as we see in other parts of the world, fewer speakers of the ‘bigger’ language know (or claim to know) the ‘smaller’ one than vice versa. Russian and Ukrainian are quite mutually intelligible and there is also a mixed variant, Surzhyk (су́ржик = code-mixing). Like other linguistic mixes, it has often been seen pejoratively. The final chapter deals with the Baltic countries. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were all within the Soviet Union, so it is unsurprising that the bulk of the coverage here is given to protective policies vis-à-vis Russian. Historical minority varieties and the recent rise of English are also subjects of research.
Concluding remarks This brief introduction has illuminated some of the unique aspects and the recurring themes in this fine collection. Among the former, we note that – among the immigrant-receiving countries of the new world – Canada has two dominant European-language streams. The insular Englishes of the Atlantic exist in contexts having no pre-existing indigenous populations. Basque and Catalan in Spain are virtually alone among minority languages in having strong urban centres. Nationalist impulses require making two languages out of Serbo-Croatian. And so on. Among the latter, we find the increasing and sometimes worrying clout of English, the power of language in the maintenance of group identity, the tensions among indigenous and ‘smaller’ languages, and the great variations in the scope and the effects of language policies. With this felicitous combination of specificity and generality, readers are given both an entry into particular situations and a grasp of cross-context similarities.
7
PART I
The Americas
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-2
The Americas
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The Americas
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1 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN THE USA Kirk Hazen
Introduction In the US, sociolinguistics is not a single discipline guided by a coherent motivation towards a unified goal. Instead it is a loose federation of fields examining the intersections of language and society. These fields are sampled in this chapter. Some of them appear more prevalently in the US than perhaps in other countries. For example, variationist sociolinguistics, drawing from the influence of Labov (1963) and Weinreich et al. (1968), has a major presence in the US although there has been a shift since the early 2000s (see Eckert, 2018). Numerous studies in this chapter push forward sociolinguistics by rebuilding theoretical frameworks laid decades earlier. For example, Eckert (2003) focuses on the conceptualization of the “authentic speaker,” the supposed “pure” vernacular speaker. Recognizing that sociolinguistics has been a composite of several fields since its inception, Bucholtz (2003) follows Eckert’s article with a view that authenticity is often designed with nostalgia as the theme; for a remedy, she argues for a more self-reflective sociolinguistics. Beyond a small survey of the vast sociolinguistic work conducted in the US,1 the intent here is to provide for some of Bucholtz’s suggested reflection on the enterprise of sociolinguistics in the US. Its goals and progress should be regularly reassessed to provide the best possible scholarship for the two main focus areas, the sociolinguistics of society and the sociolinguistics of language (following Fasold, 1987, 1990). This chapter is divided into those two broad sections.
Sociolinguistics of society Region and dialectology The touchstone work in modern dialectology is Labov, Ash and Boberg (2006), as it provides a sketch of phonological differences for most of North America. Some areas received less attention than others in that volume, and subsequent work has filled in the earlier outlines. The three volumes of Speech in the Western States builds from the wide scope and acoustic phonetic methods of the Atlas of North American English. The first volume focuses on phonetic changes in vowel systems in California, Oregon, and Washington, discounting the notion of a unified Western dialect
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-3
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(Fridland et al., 2016). The second volume covers the vowel systems of Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Montana; these studies reveal diversity across the region while also providing some evidence of Western regional patterns (Fridland et al., 2017). Volume three foregrounds the vowel system variation of underrepresented speakers in Western states, including Native Americans, African Americans, and Japanese Americans (Fridland et al., 2020). Some variables have become staples of modern research. One is the low-back merger. Irons (2007) proposes a profile of eastern Kentucky where the merger is expanding because of the glide loss of /ɔ/ in Southern US phonology. The same explanation can be applied to adjacent West Virginia where Southern West Virginia speakers demonstrate a higher rate of merger than Northern West Virginia speakers despite the merger being complete in western Pennsylvania (Reed, 2020). Becker (2020) is a thorough and comprehensive set of studies of the low-back merger and the often overlapping shift of BAT, BET, and BIT vowels; the volume demonstrates that this shift is widespread in North America and that it is triggered by the instability created by the low-back merger itself. D’Onofrio (2021) examines the perception of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) in Chicago across different age levels. Although it is a reversing sound change in Chicago, D’Onofrio finds that significant age differences exist where the youngest subjects had the more “NCS-like perceptual boundaries,” indicating that “a listener’s own positionality, experience and ideas about others in their community may condition their sociolinguistic expectations” (D’Onofrio, 2021, p. 101038). Contact across national borders is also recognized in the regional literature. Although contact with Canadians has supposedly transferred Canadian raising with /ai/ and /au/ to Vermont, Roberts (2007) finds the variability for these two vowels to suggest otherwise. Roberts finds that / ai/ is influenced by both age and gender with the oldest males having the front central variants predominantly. In addition, the /ai/ vowel does not follow the linguistic constraint of raising before only voiceless obstruents but instead is raised before all sounds. This pattern is a contrast from American raising, a process of /ai/ raising before voiceless obstruents found throughout the US (Davis & Berkson, 2021). How regional variation is studied and represented is also changing with advances in computational practices. Jones and Renwick (2022) used local spatial autocorrelation instead of isoglosses to demarcate geographic sub-patterns in the US South. In contrast to Labov et al. (2006), their study does not support a sub-region labeled the “inland South.” Often connections between regions and the implications for historical developments are the focus for scholars. Carmichael and Becker (2018) quantitatively assess the long-noted connection between New York City and New Orleans. Using constraint ranking comparisons of variable nonrhoticity and BOUGHT-raising, they find that these features diffused from New York City to New Orleans, substantiating the historical connection. Not all regional studies are phonetic in nature. Burkette (2020) discusses English in Ashe County, North Carolina in the Appalachian mountains. She focuses on the use of conversational narrative to create community and display identity through the analysis of two grammatical variables: a-prefixing (they said he’s a-coming down) and nonstandard past tense (And they said he run till he dropped). At the northern end of Appalachia, Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson (2006) examine the sociolinguistic history of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, using an intersectional analysis of historical records, ethnography, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic interviews. They track the evolution of linguistic features from markers of social class to markers of “place.” With the increasing recognition of diversity in African-American English, Charity (2007) investigates regional differences in low socioeconomic status of African-American children’s speech. Charity utilized sentences primed with standard English features, which are often variable 14
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for African American speakers, such as the omission of final consonants (e.g. best à bes’) or the copula (e.g. She is pretty à she pretty). New Orleans children were found to have higher vernacular rates than those in either Cleveland or Washington, DC. Despite the many studies of African American Language (AAL), its development and geographic spread have not been coherently explained in sociolinguistic scholarship. Farrington et al. (2021) reassess the variation within African American communities to eschew the assumption of homogeneity in AAL. Through a review of the African American Vowels Shift (AAVS), which involves the raising of the front lax vowels and non-fronting of back vowels, they account for effects from the Great Migration and local changes that affected the AAVS, specifically incorporating migration, segregation, and place/identity into their sociolinguistic explanation.
Ethnicity The most studied dialects in the US are the varieties spoken by African Americans. Accordingly, articles dealing with these varieties can be found throughout this chapter, and new realms of study have recently been established, such as the examination of middle class African American speech (Weldon, 2021). Although primary research forms the basis for articles on ethnicity, US scholars are also concerned with applied results of their work. For example, Rickford et al. (2004) provide an exhaustive bibliography of scholarship on education and African American English. For an overview of sociolinguistic work in education, see Reaser et al. (2017) and Hudley and Mallinson (2015). For an important docuseries on the variation and history of African American English in the US, Talking Black in America now has several films (Hutcheson & Cullinan, 2018). Ethnic variation also takes place in American Sign Language, and the documentary Signing Black in America (Smith et al., 2020) is the first documentary about Black ASL. This variety developed because of segregated African American Deaf communities. Green (2002) and Mufwene et al. (2007) both provide overviews of research and findings for African American English varieties in the US. Thomas (2007) provides both a summary and detailed description of the phonological and phonetic characteristics of AAVE (African American Vernacular English). The southeastern US is a frequently studied region for ethnic differences. Kohn et al. (2021) is the largest longitudinal study of African American English in the US, and they thoroughly assess ways the African American Vowel Shift differs from the Southern Vowel Shift. For example, the TRAP, DRESS, and KIT vowels front and rise but unlike the SVS (Southern Vowel Shift) they do not diphthongize, a key difference for listeners. Both Holt (2018) and Holt and Ellis (2019) corroborate these findings when they compared African Americans to Whites in eastern and western communities in North Carolina; they found that African Americans lacked fronting of GOAT and GOOSE but had more raised TRAP, BAIT, and DRESS. Kohn et al.’s (2021) study also found longitudinally that vowel space for African Americans shrank from early elementary school through their teens. While assessing many factors that could potentially influence their vowel systems, Kohn et al. (2021) showed that participants’ communities were the main indicators for vernacular variants of African American English. Mallinson and Childs (2007) investigated language variation patterns in an ethnically diverse Appalachian community through Communities of Practice. Their examination of diagnostic phonological and morphological variables for Black Appalachian women reveals that identity practices are aligned with Community of Practice membership even in a small and ethnically divided village. Numerous studies have reexamined the development of AAVE in the US (e.g. Wolfram & Thomas, 2002). Wolfram (2003) argues for the regional accommodation of earlier AAVEs which 15
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subsequently maintained a similar substrate of language variation patterns. He argues that the regional accommodation of AAVE has given way to younger generations moving towards more nationally generalized AAVE norms. Despite the emphasis on varieties of African-American English, the US is a diverse nation with a wide variety of ethnic dialects. The largest non-European-American ethnic group is the Latinx community, and sociolinguists are increasingly recognizing this demographic fact. Thomas’s book Mexican American English investigates growing ethnolects in Texas and North Carolina across multiple generations. Different varieties of Latinx English are now a regular part of the Southern language landscape, and though the varieties may have begun with Spanish interference features, they have evolved over several generations into stable ethnolects (Thomas, 2019). The effects of local social environments is illustrated in Erin Callahan’s (2018) assessment of past-tense unmarking in North Carolina: “Ethnicity functions in a more nuanced way in Durham, showing effects at the level of ‘micro-community.’” Wolfram et al. (2004) examine newly established Hispanic populations in North Carolina and the extent to which they accommodate to local norms. Through an instrumental acoustic analysis of the /ai/ diphthong, the authors find no accommodation to a fully unglided vowel but glide weakening for the more rural Hispanic English speakers. At times the interactions of different ethnic groups provide fertile ground for study. Reyes (2005) explains the strategies through which Asian American teens employ African American slang and the value of that slang. By closely examining metapragmatic discussions of slang, she finds that slang and identities constructed from its use are able to establish divisions, not only between generations, but also between different teenage groups. Studies of ethnicity can also be used to further social justice. Rickford and King (2016) examine the discourse, lectal alignments, and lexical variation of the leading prosecution witness, Rachel Jeantel, in the trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin. They find that because she spoke African American Vernacular English, her testimony was perceived as “incomprehensible and not credible.” This dismissal of her speech not only took place in the court room by the defense and the jury, but it was also widely propagated in social media. Rickford and King find that Jeantel’s variation was highly systematic and that unfamiliarity on the part of the jury and institutional racism in the court system contributed to the outcome of the trial.
Sexuality and gender The sociolinguistic study of sexuality and gender is a burgeoning field and has made considerable strides in the last decade. Bucholtz and Hall (2004) debate the role of identity-based vs. desire-based research, arguing that such a binary choice restricts the possibilities in studying the sociolinguistics of sexuality. They argue that sexuality should be understood as a broad sociocultural phenomenon. The scholarship of language and sexuality ranges from studies of sexual orientation to that of linguistic factors of trans identity: e.g., Zimman (2017) details how the steps of linguistic self-determination in particular sociolinguistics contexts has made it possible for trans activists to develop linguistic agency in the creation of identity. In a study of gender in a Native American community, Innes (2006) investigates Muskogee women’s linguistically active role in public spheres. Innes argues that what Muskogee women call “gossip” is a powerful genre for the culture since it maintains appropriate social behavior. In reviewing the literature on perceptual language cues of sexual orientation, Munson and Babel (2007) address an idea widely believed by the general public. They do find that some speakers represent their sexual orientation through their speech, but that the phonetic parameters of homosexual or bisexual speech are not complete approximations of opposite-sex qualities. They also go further to discuss the implications from the literature for fields such as language acquisition 16
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and language processing. Munson (2007) conducted an in-depth sociophonetic study of perceived traits, including sexual orientation, masculinity, and femininity. His research showed that perceived sexual orientation, masculinity, and femininity are distinct yet correlated perceptual factors, with some acoustic measures more strongly correlated than others. Podesva and Van Hofwegen (2016) conducted a study of /s/ variation in an inland Northern Californian community, which leaned towards more conservative political and religious beliefs, in order to assess the roles of sex, gender, and sexual orientation on acoustic variation. They find the normative patterns discussed in previous research but also significant differences between LGBT and straight speakers, with each producing more extreme variants than do urban speakers in the same categories. Podesva and Van Hofwegen (2016) argue that the political conservatism of the community polarizes distinctions.
Language change/age In alignment with the roots of the field (Labov, 1963; Weinreich et al., 1968), US sociolinguists continue to focus on language change within speech communities. Innovations in recent research also develop from research on language change across the lifespan. For example, Cameron (2005) tracks the co-occurrence of age segregation and sex segregation throughout the life span of Puerto Rican Spanish speakers. He demonstrates that gender is constructed differently and fluidly across different spans of a person’s life. In looking at the transmission problem of language change, Jacewicz et al. (2006) explore the role of prosodic prominence in chain shifts through regional acoustic analysis and perceptual experiments. The authors find that emphatic productions are more prominent with women, and that correspondingly their vowels are longer, more diphthongal, and rated as better, regardless of speaker or listener. Continuing his work on language change over 50 years, Labov (2007) compares the transmission of linguistic change within a speech community to the diffusion across communities. He finds that transmission faithfully preserves the language variation patterns while diffusion does not. He concludes from this finding that the key difference between diffusion and transmission is the language learning abilities of children (transmission) versus the adults (diffusion).
Community groupings One reoccurring concern within sociolinguistics is how speakers group themselves in socially meaningful ways: Do our methodologies appropriately model those interactions? Accordingly, researchers focus on speech communities, communities of practice, social networks, individuals, families, and other divisions (see Chambers et al., 2002). Communities of Practice noted earlier (Mallinson & Childs, 2007) are one important step in delineating language variation patterns in communities. Social networks are the focus in Dodsworth and Benton (2019), which incorporates advances in social network methods from sociology to construct a quantitative study of class in the vowel system of Raleigh, NC. They find that some class patterns, such as blue collar~white collar differences, persisted for stable sociolinguistic variables, but that for changing variables social forces connected to occupation and social-network nestedness correlated with the dispersion of vowels changes.
Personae The study of personae in sociolinguistics is another innovation that has been successfully used to expand sociolinguistics explanatory powers, especially for how “interactional practice builds 17
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up to form larger-scale patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change” (D’Onofrio, 2020, p. 1). D’Onofrio (2019) argues that sociolinguistic perception involves personae, as listeners responded differently to the same individual who played different roles; from this study she also argues that “listener’s sociolinguistic expectations” are more detailed than have been traditionally treated, especially for racialized groups in sociolinguistic studies. King (2021) employs the persona of the Mobile Black Professional to sociolinguistically explain BAT lowering and retraction in Rochester, NY; she argues that accurate accounts of local sound changes must include racialized speakers, the personae they adopt, and the socially meaningful ways they employ such changes. In a related approach, Shport (2018) tested perceived femininity in Southern states and found that fronter and longer allophones of KIT, DRESS, and LOT were heard as more feminine, correlating with a few of the advanced components of the Southern Vowel Shift.
Multilingualism Although, from a historical perspective, US sociolinguistics has been predominantly focused on English, recent research has focused more evenly on other languages in the United States. In an examination of the nature of lexical and structural borrowing, Brown (2003) studies bilingual morphemes in the speech of 22 French-English speakers. However, the balance between French and English has been shifting in Louisiana for each generation and accordingly the characteristics of English dominance has shifted over time. Her data on morphological reanalysis suggest that a complex interplay of competing grammars results from a shifting bilingual community. Through participant-observation, Barrett (2006) investigates how language ideology affects language interactions. He specifically focuses on a bilingual divide in Texas: English speaking Anglo employees and their Spanish-speaking peers. Barrett finds that Spanish serves as a tool for solidarity and resistance for the Spanish speakers, but that the Anglo managers do not accommodate themselves to the Spanish-speaking employees. Instead the Anglo managers use English with scatterings of mock Spanish: When miscommunications occurred, the managers held the Spanish-speaking employees responsible. Barrett concludes that racial segregation and inequality are fostered by these competing functions. The lexical boundaries between languages is a productive site for sociolinguistic research. Cacoullos and Aaron (2003) conducted a corpus study of New Mexican Spanish discourse to examine whether or not the use of single English words are nonce loans or code-switches. The authors demonstrate the utility of variationist methodology by demonstrating different grammatical conditions for New Mexican Spanish and English in the discourse, even though the rate of bare nouns is similar. They find that these items are loan words. Torres (2002) investigates the use of bilingual discourse markers in Brentwood, NY, taking up the difficult case of whether the English discourse markers are instances of code-switching or borrowing: She finds that they demonstrate a continuum of code-switching and borrowing, indicating a change in progress for New York Puerto Rican Spanish. Flores-Ferrán (2004) examines subject personal pronouns in a contact variety of Puerto Rican residents of New York City. Overall, the New York City speakers greatly resembled the variation found in Puerto Rico. Despite the native-born New York City Puerto Ricans’ use of explicit subject personal pronouns, Flores-Ferrán finds little evidence for an English contact hypothesis. Sign language research in sociolinguistics has also flourished in recent decades. The sociolinguistics of sign languages engages all of the realms of sociolinguistics, from attitudes to multilingualism to the smallest types of language variation (Kusters & Lucas, 2022). One of the areas of sign language sociolinguistics is the establishment of signed systems as languages, and part 18
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of this effort is the differentiation of many varieties. An evolving area of study is the complex multimodal systems of signed/spoken/written languages that occur in contexts where signers and speakers interact. In those interactions, attitudes and ideologies play an important role in guiding communication. Hill and Tamene (2022) discuss the importance of attitudes and ideologies that privilege spoken varieties over signed varieties and some signed varieties over each other. They argue that recognizing and documenting the hierarchical social orders for signed languages will aid our sociolinguistic understanding of them.
Sociolinguistics of language Phonology and phonetics The realm of phonology has been productive for US sociolinguistics, and numerous works throughout this chapter contain phonetic and phonological analyses because they allow for fine-grained linguistic tools to explore social factors. In addition, the complexity of phonology lends itself to detailed accounts of language variation in the mind. Often, the phonological concerns of sociolinguists focus on changes to systems or competition between systems. For example, Carmichael (2020) explored the short-a system of the New Orleans region after the massive demographic shift resulting from Hurricane Katrina. In her comparison of those who left the region and those who stayed, she finds that there has been a shift from the previously dominant split system (short-a is raised in some environments) and the simpler and more nationally ubiquitous nasal system (where short-a is raised before nasals). Relocation was not important to the correlation with a speaker’s short-a system, but orientation to place appears to have been the largest influence. Beyond vowels, many other kinds of phonological patterns prove useful for sociolinguists. Podesva (2007) contributes to sociophonetics by investigating voice quality through the examination of falsetto phonation. In a case study of one gay, male, US English speaker, Podesva finds that the social context, and hence the construction of style and speaker identity, modulates falsetto phonation, which is characterized by higher fundamental frequency (f0) levels and wider f0 ranges. Podesva bridges a wide range of disciplines by connecting sociophonetics with the social construction of meaning in discourse by situating phonetic forms in their discursive contexts. Topic variation is a productive realm for phonological sociolinguistic studies. Walker (2019) considered three phonological variables connected to variation between British and US English. By specifically examining second-dialect exposure, Walker assesses speaker variation based on topic and regional mobility. She finds that the speakers’ experience is paramount because they can only shift between variants in their repertoire. Despite increased knowledge of any phonological variable, topic-based shifting appears to be guided independently. Walker suggests stereotypical sociolinguistic representations drive topic-based shifts. Holliday (2021a) examined biracial Black men in Washington, DC, and found that they controlled their racialized stylistic variation, especially L+H* pitch accents (see Holliday, 2021b for the symbolization used here), in accordance with topic and audience when they discussed police narratives, avoiding African-American intonational features during those contexts. Holliday surmises that both racial and linguistic identities are subject to topic and audience conditioned variation. She finds that individuals have the ability to implement intonational variables to align themselves with certain audiences and topics. Sociolinguistic research in the US supports a broad investigation into phonological theory. Dinkin and Dodsworth (2017) compare the processes of /ay/ monophthongization in the US South 19
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in two phonetic environments, that of following voiceless (PRICE) and following voiced (PRIZE) consonants. Working from the assumption that monophthongization is the trigger for the Southern Vowel Shift, they deduce that PRICE and PRIZE variation must be two ends of a phonetic continuum and not separate allophones. Analyzing data from the Inland South, they find that the two renditions of /ay/ are on a continuum, which contrasts to findings outside of that region. Their findings support a modular feedforward phonological theory.
Morphology and syntax Some sociolinguistic studies focus on morphological and syntactic language variation patterns, but overall this area of scholarship is smaller than sociophonetic studies. Bayley et al. (2002) examine American Sign Language variation in the 1-handshape2 with more than 5,000 tokens across the United States. This language variation pattern is conditioned by multiple social and linguistic factors, including grammatical function and preceding and following segments, although assimilation is a second order constraint to grammatical function. Importantly, on the social-theoretical front, signers of every region of the US demonstrate similar language variation patterns with the 1-handshape and thus can be seen as a single, albeit geographically discontinuous, speech community. Carter (2013) examines the adoption of African American English grammatical structures by Latino teenagers, including verbal -s absence, past be leveling, copula deletion, and invariant be. He finds that Latino students do use these features, but that the distribution within the Latino contingent is different from the African American students, specifically in regard to gender differences and racial complexities within the Latino ethnic category.
Mental grammar and language acquisition One of the accomplishments of modern sociolinguistics is that other, more traditional fields of linguistics have begun to study language variation from their particular perspectives (Hazen, 2007). Here, the works exemplified focus on language acquisition and the organization of the mental grammar. Bybee (2002) promotes the exemplar model to demonstrate how frequency effects can account for how rapidly an ongoing change progresses. In examining /t,d/ deletion, Bybee challenges models of language change employing underlying phonemic forms and the constraints of bound morphemes for /t,d/ deletion. By detailing how sociolinguistic information might be stored in the lexicon, Bybee (2007) further contributes to knowledge of the mental grammar. Gahl and Garnsey (2004) examine the interaction of grammar and usage, reporting a case of pronunciation variation that reflects contextual probabilities of syntactic structures. Their results are consistent with the notion that knowledge of grammar includes knowledge of probabilities of syntactic structures, and that this knowledge affects language production. In reassessment of language acquisition, Clark and Wong (2002) argue for the importance of pragmatics in the acquisition of the lexicon. Through both linguistic and nonlinguistic means, adults offer language-acquiring children pragmatic directions on every level of language use. Direct offers of lexical information are important at early stages, and children use this directly offered pragmatic information in their attention to lexical meanings and relations. Working from evidence drawn from experimental results and natural conversation, Clark and Wong (2002) present this pragmatic view as an alternative to constraint-based accounts of lexical acquisition. 20
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Lexicon Since its early connections with dialectology (Hazen, 2007), sociolinguistics in the US has maintained a concern for changes in lexical usage. However, given the complexity of human language, numerous studies concentrating on lexical items also must contend with phonological, morphosyntactic, and social influences which guide the choice of some words over others. Some lexical studies are focused on shifts in the usage of specific words away from traditional denotations. In a study with a narrow focus but wide appeal, and drawing from sources ranging from media to student surveys, Kiesling (2004) investigates the word dude and finds that the “casual and cool stance” of dude plays an important role in some men’s homosociality in the US. Frequently studied lexical changes involve the system of quotatives. Cukor-Avila (2002) investigates quotatives in African American Vernacular English in east-central Texas. She finds that adolescents are propagating the form be like in all quotative contexts but that the grammatical and discourse constraints remain constant. In the study of a computerized corpus of quotatives, Barbieri (2007) examines the effect of sex and speaker age on the performance be like, go, be all, and say in modern spoken American English. She finds that sex differences are more vigorous for those under 40, with age negatively correlated with use of be like for women. The same finding was not true for men. Kohn and Franz (2009) investigated quotatives in both Latino and African American communities in North Carolina. They found quotative be like to be grammaticalized for direct speech and thought for both communities; In the Latino community, first-person subjects favored be like. Overall, these two communities aligned with others in the United States although how linguistic constraints affected variation differed for each group. Stabile (2019) examined a different side of the like spectrum, that of discourse-pragmatic like, in two languages of Hawai’i: Pidgin and Hawai’i English. Drawing from both a matched-guise perception experiment and several corpus-based studies, Stabile (2019) explains how this global language change functions in a multilingual context and the concomitant social work. In Hawai’i, the global patterns are replicated but some social norms are changed: e.g. young Pidgin-speaking men use discourse marker like with greater frequency than young women. That gender divide is not the case for Hawai’i English, however.
Pragmatics, discourse, and conversation In recent work, one of the most productive areas has been the study of language “above the sentence.” The fields of pragmatics and discourse analysis have produced articles stemming from diverse methodologies on an extensive range of topics. A more traditional technique of analysis is the discourse marker, which has been used for both ethnic and gender analysis. Wharry (2003) studies discourse markers of African American English in sermons, finding functions of textual boundary marker, spiritual maintenance filler, rhythmic marker, and occasionally the call-response marker. Schiffrin (2002) analyzes the life story of one Holocaust survivor to locate and explicate two sets of relationships: one with the mother and one with a collective of friends. Schiffrin demonstrates how life-stories place local relations within more archetypal roles such as victim, survivor, or bystander. Schiffrin’s article also provides a richly textured view of how powerful events echo through sociolinguistic variation. In an innovative study, Keating and Mirus (2003) examine how the internet shapes language practice in the Deaf community. Keating and Mirus find that signers transform their normal 21
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communication practices through trial and error, often limiting sign space, altering the production of signs, slowing signing speed down, and layering redundancy. They conclude that signers have a new frontier to explore and in which to develop new genres of signing. Fleming and Slotta (2018) studied the choice of address for family. Some families use kinship terms to note relations (e.g. mother, uncle, niece) whereas others use proper names in addressing others. They find a “striking regularity” in the use of these forms of address. Across numerous cultures, in communities that alternate between the types of address, the kinship terms are used for older family members and the names are used for younger family members. Fleming and Slotta (2018) argue that the kin terms are seen as honorifics in these cultures and names as “antihonorific,” and that the convergence of linguistic forms under similar sociolinguistic function allows for cross-cultural sociolinguistic investigation. Acton (2019) conducts a rigorous quantitative study of the social significance of the English definite article the. Using a variationist approach, Acton finds that the use of the with a plural NP (e.g. the Americans) presents that group as a monolith, disconnected from the speaker of the utterance; using the bare plural form (e.g. Americans) does not present the same semantic interpretations. The indexical character of a the utterance and the perspectives of the interlocuters combine to create these effects.
Perception studies For sociolinguistics in the US, researchers often employ perception studies to estimate how listeners interpret social factors. Perceptual studies are a methodological choice, and most US sociolinguists who use them do so to study social factors, working mostly with regional divisions and sexual orientation. Following in the footsteps of Preston (1999), Benson (2003) analyzes folk perceptions to address the question of US dialect boundaries, providing a more complete picture of speech communities: For example, perceptual studies show that Ohioans from central and northwestern Ohio want to maintain a nonSouthern identity. Similarly, Cramer (2020) argues for nuanced perceptions of Appalachia from her studies of Kentucky respondents and their (non) adherence to a Southern identity. Bucholtz et al. (2007) conducted the first detailed perceptual dialectological study of California. They find that the most salient linguistic boundary is between the northern and southern regions, with category labels ranging from ‘surfers’ to ‘hicks’ playing a role in the social map. Clopper and Pisoni (2006) find that listeners could make the large divisions between dialect varieties (Northeastern, Southern, Western) but not smaller subdivisions. Naïve listeners correctly categorized talkers with 26 percent overall accuracy. Familiarity with the dialect variety, as a result of mobility, increased the listeners’ ability to distinctively distinguish varieties. Clopper and Pisoni (2006) emphasize that having category labels for the different varieties made a crucial difference for listeners. By digesting many studies on perception of African-American and European-American voices, Thomas and Reaser (2004) induce that Americans can accurately recognize the ethnicity of a speaker, even in the absence of stereotypical morphosyntactic features. To approach an answer to the question of what cues listeners use to identify ethnicity, Thomas and Reaser conduct an experiment involving features of a European-American vernacular from Hyde County, North Carolina, demonstrating that African Americans with atypical features are difficult for listeners to identify. Cheng and Cho (2021) used speech from Bilingual Korean Americans in California to test listeners in their perceptions of race and ethnicity. Korean listeners were more likely to rate the speakers as Asian/Korean, and non-Asian listeners rated the speakers as White. They also found that for 22
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female speakers, pitch and perceived Asianness were positively correlated, which points out the importance of listeners’ metalinguistic commentary. Cheng and Cho (2021) conclude that listeners’ own ethnic identity as well as their familiarity with a variety interact with their perceptions.
Covariation At the border between the sociolinguistics of society and the sociolinguistics of language is the study of covariation, often cast as lectal coherence (Beaman & Guy, 2022). Within this area of study, questions focus on which variables ebb and flow with each other for communities, social groups, or individuals. Tamminga (2021) examines how covariation between different vowels covary over time, finding that their fluctuations are connected to community changes. She argues that questions of “leadership” of language change are separate from which individuals take up multiple changes. Dodsworth and Kohn (2021) examine covariation for supra-regional vowel shifts, working from the assumption that if supra-regional changes are correlated within communities, the social aspects of those individuals leading the changes will inform us about who those adopters are. In examining /ay/ raising before voiceless obstruents and the low-back merger shift, they find few correlations for these changes, despite change in each of those vowel subsystems. Becker (2016) examines coherence in NY City English through three variables, R-dropping, BOUGHT and BAD raising, all declining variables. Through a topic-focused, intra-interview study of bricolage, she finds a lack of covariation but does find links between the speaker’s bricolage and community-level patterns.
Conclusion The breadth of research topics and research methods in this chapter illustrates the plethora of sociolinguistic subfields in the US. From acoustic phonetics to discourse analysis, US sociolinguists employ the entire repertoire of modern linguistic methodology to varieties of English, Spanish, ASL, and other languages. In the future, sociolinguistic scholars in their disparate subfields should work together in teams and emphasize their common goals to ensure efficient research with the limited resources available. By examining the current state of sociolinguistics and evaluating research across subspecialties, researchers can construct a fuller, more connected body of scholarship in order to understand the social ways in which humans use language.
Notes 1 A similar survey of modern US sociolinguistic research could be written with a completely different set of references, and thus works cited herein should not be seen as the sum total of US research. 2 The 1-handshape is the use of the hand with the index finger extended and the others closed. This handshape is used in the first-person singular pronoun and can be altered in numerous ways (e.g. more than one finger can be extended). See for a demonstration: http://commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/aslweb/O/W2608.htm
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Kirk Hazen Bayley, R., Lucas, C., & Rose, M. (2002). Phonological variation in American Sign language: The case of 1 handshape. Language Variation and Change, 14, 19–54. Beaman, K. V., & Guy, G. R. (Eds.). (2022). The coherence of linguistic communities: Orderly heterogeneity and social meaning. Routledge. Becker, K. (2016). Linking community coherence, individual coherence, and bricolage: The co-occurrence of (r), raised BOUGHT and raised BAD in New York City English. Lingua, 172–173, 87–99. Becker, K. (2020). The low-back-merger shift: Uniting the Canadian vowel shift, the California vowel shift, and short front vowel shifts across North America. Publications of the American Dialect Society 104. Duke University Press. Benson, E. (2003). Folk linguistic perceptions and the mapping of dialect boundaries. American Speech, 78, 307–330. Brown, B. (2003). Code-convergent borrowing in Louisiana French. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7, 3–23. Bucholtz, M. (2003). Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentification of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7, 398–416. Bucholtz, M., Bermudez, N., Fung, V., Edwards, L., & Vargas, R. (2007). Hella nor cal or totally so cal? The perceptual dialectology of California. Journal of English Linguistics, 35, 325–352. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2004). Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society, 33, 469–515. Burkette, A. (2020). Discourse in appalachia. In Appalachian Englishes in the twenty-first century (pp. 55–68). WVU Press. Bybee, J. L. (2002). Word frequency and context of use in the lexical diffusion of phonetically conditioned sound change. Language Variation and Change, 14, 261–290. Bybee, J. L. (2007). From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language, 82, 711–733. Cacoullos, R. T., & Aaron, J. E. (2003). Bare English-origin nouns in Spanish: Rates, constraints, and discourse functions. Language Variation and Change, 15, 289–328. Callahan, E. (2018). Emerging hispanicized English in the Nuevo New South: Language variation in a triethnic community. Routledge. Cameron, R. (2005). Aging and gendering. Language in Society, 34, 23–61. Carmichael, K. (2020). (æ)fter the storm: An examination of the short-a system in Greater New Orleans. Language Variation and Change, 32(1), 107–131. Carmichael, K., & Becker, K. (2018). The New York City – New Orleans connection: Evidence from constraint ranking comparison. Language Variation and Change, 30(3), 287–314. Carter, P. M. (2013). Shared spaces, shared structures: Latino social formation and African American English in the US South. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(1), 66–92. Chambers, J., Trudgill, P., & Schilling-Estes, N. (2002). The handbook of language variation and change. Blackwell. Charity, A. H. (2007). Regional differences in low SES African-American children’s speech in the school setting. Language Variation and Change, 19, 281–293. Cheng, A., & Cho, S. (2021). The effect of ethnicity on identification of Korean American speech. Languages, 6, 186. Clark, E. V., & Wong, A. D. W. (2002). Pragmatic directions about language use: Offers of words and relations. Language in Society, 31, 181–212. Clopper, C. G., & Pisoni, D. B. (2006). Effects of region of origin and geographic mobility on perceptual dialect categorization. Language Variation and Change, 18, 193–221. Cramer, J. (2020). Identity and representation in Appalachia. In Appalachian Englishes in the twenty-first century (pp. 69–83). WVU Press. Cukor-Avila, P. (2002). She say, she go, she be like: Verbs of quotation over time in African American Vernacular English. American Speech, 77, 3–31. Davis, S., & Berkson, K. (Eds.). (2021). American raising. PADS 106. Duke University Press. Dinkin, A. J., & Dodsworth, R. (2017). Gradience, allophony, and chain shifts. Language Variation and Change, 29(1), 101–127. Dodsworth, R., & Benton, R. (2019). Language variation and change in social networks: A bipartite approach. Routledge. Dodsworth, R., & Kohn, M. E. (2021). Supra-regional changes are uncorrelated: A community comparison. In Stuart Davis and Kelly Berkson (Eds.), American raising. PADS 106. Duke University Press. D’Onofrio, A. (2019). Complicating categories: Personae mediate racialized expectations of non-native speech. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(4), 346–366.
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Kirk Hazen Kohn, M. E., & Franz, H. A. (2009, August 1). Localized patterns for global variants: The case of quotative systems of African American and Latino speakers. American Speech, 84(3), 259–297. https://doi. org/10.1215/00031283-2009-022 Kohn, M. E., Wolfram, W., Farrington, C., Renn, J., & Hofwegen, J. V. (2021). African American language: Language development from infancy to adulthood. Cambridge University Press. Kusters, A., & Lucas, C. (2022). Emergence and evolutions: Introducing sign language sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 26(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12522 Labov, W. (1963). The social motivation of language change. Word, 19, 273–309. Labov, W. (2007). Transmission and diffusion. Language, 83, 344–387. Labov, W., Ash, S., & Boberg, C. (2006). Atlas of North American English. Mouton de Gruyter. Mallinson, C., & Childs, B. (2007). Communities of practice in sociolinguistic descriptions. Gender and Language, 1, 173–206. Mufwene, S. K., Rickford, J. R., Bailey, G., & Baugh, J. (Eds.). (2007). African American English. Routledge. Munson, B. (2007). The acoustic correlates of perceived masculinity, perceived femininity, and perceived sexual orientation. Language and Speech, 50(1), 125–142. Munson, B., & Babel, M. (2007). Loose lips and silver tongues, or, projecting sexual orientation through speech. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1, 416–449. Podesva, R. J. (2007). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11, 478–504. Podesva, R. J., & Van Hofwegen, J. (2016). /s/exuality in small‐town California. In E. Levon and R. Beline Mendes (Eds.) Language, sexuality, and power (pp. 168–188). Oxford University Press. Preston, D. (1999). Handbook of perceptual dialectology. Benjamins. Reaser, J., Adger, C. T., Wolfram, W., & Christian, D. (2017). Dialects at school: Educating linguistically diverse students. Routledge. Reed, P. (2020). Phonological possibilities in appalachian Englishes. In Appalachian Englishes in the twentyfirst century (pp. 21–35). WVU Press. Reyes, A. (2005). Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9, 509–532. Rickford, J. R., & King, S. (2016). Language and linguistics on trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and other vernacular speakers) in the courtroom and beyond. Language, 92(4), 948–988. Rickford, J. R., Sweetland, J., & Rickford, A. E. (2004). African American English and other vernaculars in education: A topic-coded bibliography. Journal of English Linguistics, 32, 230–320. Roberts, J. (2007). Vermont lowering? Raising some questions about /ai/ and /au/ south of the Canadian border. Language Variation and Change, 19, 181–197. Schiffrin, D. (2002). Mother and friends in a Holocaust life story. Language in Society, 31, 309–353. Shport, I. A. (2018). The roles of vowel fronting, lengthening, and listener variables in the perception of vocal femininity. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 61(1), 130–144. Smith, A., Wolfram, W., & Cullinan, D. (2020). Signing Black in America: The story of Black American Sign language. American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, 95(2), 253–260. Stabile, C. M. (2019). “Like, local people doing that”: variation in the production and social perception of discourse-pragmatic like in Pidgin and Hawai ‘i English [PhD dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Manoa]. Tamminga, M. (2021). Leaders of language change: Macro and micro perspectives. In H. Van de Velde, N. H. Hilton, & R. Knooihuizen (Eds.), Language variation – European perspectives VIII (pp. 273–293). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Thomas, E. R. (2007). Phonological and phonetic characteristics of African American Vernacular English. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1, 450–475. Thomas, E. R. (Ed.). (2019). Mexican American English: Substrate influence and the birth of an ethnolect. Cambridge University Press. Thomas, E. R., & Reaser, J. (2004). Delimiting perceptual cues used for the ethnic labeling of African American and European American voices. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8, 54–87. Torres, L. (2002). Bilingual discourse markers in Puerto Rican Spanish. Language in Society, 31, 65–83. Walker, A. (2019). The role of dialect experience in topic-based shifts in speech production. Language Variation and Change, 31(2), 135–163. Weinreich, U., Labov, W., & Herzog, M. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel (Eds.), Directions for historical linguistics (pp. 95–188). University of Texas Press.
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Sociolinguistics in the USA Weldon, T. L. (2021). Middle-class African American English. Cambridge University Press. Wharry, C. (2003). Amen and hallelujah preaching: Discourse functions in African American sermons. Language in Society, 32, 203–225. Wolfram, W. (2003). Reexamining the development of African American English: Evidence from isolated communities. Language, 79, 282–316. Wolfram, W., Carter, P., & Moriello, B. (2004). Emerging hispanic English: New dialect formation in the American South. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8, 339–358. Wolfram, W., & Thomas, E. R. (2002). The development of African American English. Blackwell. Zimman, L. (2017). Trans people’s linguistic self‐determination and the dialogic nature of identity. In E. Hazenberg & M. Meyerhoff (Eds.), Representing trans: Linguistic, legal and everyday perspectives (pp. 226–248). Victoria University Press.
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2 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN CANADA Marisa Brook
Introduction Physically, Canada is a very large country, encompassing about 10 million square kilometres (Statistics Canada, 2011). However, the current population is sparse at 37 million and concentrated in a small number of cities (Statistics Canada, 2022). Given low birth rates, population growth in Canada in recent decades has been driven by in-migration (Statistics Canada, 2022). Immigration rates have recently reached new highs, and as newcomers tend to settle in urban areas (Statistics Canada, 2022), the country’s largest cities have become far more multicultural since the 1980s (Walker, 2015). Accordingly, the linguistic makeup of the country has been diversifying; based on the 2016 census, Dollinger (2019) puts the number of languages used in Canada at present at 293. A product of European colonialism, Canada has just two official languages on the federal level – English and French – though the 10 provinces and three northern territories all have different regional-level language policies (Boberg, 2010). European settlement of the continent has had a devastating effect on the Indigenous peoples, cultures, and languages of the land (Chapter 3 of the present volume; Dollinger, 2019); the official language policy is just one of the ways in which Canada continues to reflect colonial hegemony (Haque & Patrick, 2015). English predominates in much of the country. Most of the Francophones are found in the province of Québec – where they represent a large majority (Boberg, 2010) – or in adjacent parts of New Brunswick and Ontario (Mougeon, 2014). The provincial government of Québec has pursued strong measures to protect and uplift the status of French in the province and resist assimilation into anglophone Canada (Auger, 2005; Boberg, 2010). Among the consequences has been a mass departure of Anglophones from Québec, especially outside Montreal (Auger, 2005; Boberg, 2010; Poplack et al., 2006). While the relationship between anglophone and francophone Canada has often been tense and fraught, the abstract coexistence of English and French is now likely to strike Canadians as a valuable part of national identity (Boberg, 2010). A strong level of public support currently exists for official federal-level bilingualism, particularly among those under 35 (Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, 2016). That said, only a minority of Canadians actually speak both of these languages. The 2016 census found that the rate of self-reported French-English bilingualism was 17.9% (Statistics Canada, 2017a), a historical maximum but only barely higher than DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-4
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the counterpart figures for 2001 after a 20-year plateau (Statistics Canada, 2017a). Most of the individual-level French-English bilingualism that does exist in Canada is found in and around Québec (Turcotte, 2019), and it owes itself far more to L1 francophones learning English than to the opposite (Statistics Canada, 2017a). In the 2016 census, only 9.2% of L1 anglophones in Canada reported that they also speak French (Statistics Canada, 2017a). While many Canadians in English-majority regions are exposed to French during their primary/secondary education, they often do not retain French proficiency in adulthood (Turcotte, 2019). With the amount of immigration to Canada in recent decades, heritage languages (i.e., immigrant languages other than English or French) have been playing an increasing role in Canadian society. In both Toronto and Vancouver, the proportion of residents who are not L1 speakers of either English or French is about 50% (Boberg, 2010), and more than one-fifth of Canadians reported using a heritage language in their households in 2016 (Statistics Canada, 2017b). Conversely, the proportion of Canadians who do report at least one of the official languages as an L1 is decreasing, most recently dropping to 78.9% in the 2016 census (Statistics Canada, 2017b). Subtracting the proportion who are L1 French speakers (but not also L1 English speakers) reveals that the proportion of the Canadian population reporting themselves to be L1 anglophones in the 2016 census is only about 56% (Dollinger, 2019). Given the linguistic makeup of the country at present and where the political power has been concentrated over the course of its history, much of the sociolinguistic research pertaining to Canada thus far has been on Canadian English, which has become well-examined. There is also a substantial amount of work on varieties of Canadian French, especially from the variationist tradition. Lately, heritage languages have started receiving attention from sociolinguists, as have an increasing number of varieties of Indigenous languages, though both of these areas remain heavily understudied. For the sociolinguistics of Indigenous languages of the continent, see Chapter 3. The present chapter surveys work, predominantly recent, on Canadian English, Canadian French, and heritage languages.
Canadian English There are a number of common beliefs about the varieties of English found in Canada. One is that they are unusually homogeneous – at least among urban, middle-class dialects west of Québec (Boberg, 2010; Chambers, 1986; Dollinger & Clarke, 2012). While there is some truth to this, two points of caution are warranted. One is that similarities may represent recent convergence between different regional varieties, rather than longstanding overlap (Chambers, 2012; Denis & D’Arcy, 2019; Roeder et al., 2018). The other is that, thus far, normative varieties of English found in the cities have received by far the largest share of the attention; the use of English among e.g. rural, blue-collar, racialized, LGBTQ+, and/or otherwise marginalized or culturally distinct populations in Canada is not yet well understood (but see Baxter & Peters, 2011; Bigelow et al., 2020; Boberg & Hotton, 2015; Denis, 2021; Poplack & Tagliamonte, 2001; and Rosen & Skriver, 2015). Another generalization that has long existed is that Canadian English is something of a hybrid between British English and American English; this is at best an oversimplification (see Boberg, 2010; Dollinger & Clarke, 2012, p. 451). While normative, urban, middle-class dialects of English in Canada are generally closer to their American counterparts than to their British ones, particularly in terms of the morphosyntax (Boberg, 2010), Canadian English is a separate entity (Dollinger, 2019; Dollinger & Clarke, 2012). Notably, Canadians tend to be hyperaware of the United States and frequently interested in distinguishing themselves, linguistically and otherwise, from their neighbours to the south (Boberg, 2010; Denis, 2013). 29
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Much of the overlap with American English is traditionally but not universally attributed to an influx of arrivals from south of the border in the wake of the American War of Independence in the 1770s and 1780s (for an overview of this issue, see Boberg, 2010; Walker, 2015). Known as the United Empire Loyalists, these were British subjects from the mid-Atlantic and New England areas of the present-day United States who did not support the revolutionaries’ aims (Boberg, 2010). Given protection and transportation beyond the new borders of the United States, the Loyalists and post-Loyalist arrivals populated New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and parts of Ontario (Boberg, 2010). While immigration to Canada in the 19th century was dominated by the English, Scottish, and Irish (Boberg, 2010; Walker, 2015), the Loyalist theory proposes that the roots of Canadian English had been cemented into place via the sheer number of people from the United States (Walker, 2015). Towards the end of the 19th century, aggressive American expansion into the western half of the continent created considerable pressure on the British to likewise push settlement west of Ontario and fill the gaps all the way to the colonies on the Pacific coastline. Along with new immigrants from the British Isles, plus the United States, Germany, and Eastern Europe, most of the European settlement of the west of Canada involved people from Ontario, who would have taken their dialects with them (Boberg, 2010; Walker, 2015). Phonetically and phonologically, normative Canadian English is characterized by rhoticity, intervocalic t-flapping, mergers of LOT-THOUGHT and LOT-PALM, either a two- or three-way merry-marry-Mary merger, and no TRAP-BATH split (Boberg, 2010). An allophonic pattern known as Canadian raising (Boberg, 2010; Chambers, 1973; Walker, 2015) involves the raising of the /aj/ and /aw/ diphthongs to central nuclei before voiceless obstruents. The Canadian Shift (Boberg, 2010; Clarke et al., 1995; Friesner et al., 2021; Walker, 2015) has resulted in lowering and backing of the front lax vowels. LOT before an intervocalic /r/ has joined a merged NORTHFORCE vowel such that ‘sorry’ has the same vowel quality as ‘sore’ (Boberg, 2010). Most areas have considerable yod-dropping (i.e. loss of /j/ in /ju/ after coronal consonants) (Boberg, 2010; but see Roeder et al., 2018). “Foreign- words” such as drama, pasta, lava, plaza, and macho used to take a distinctive /æ/ in Canadian English, but younger speakers are increasingly assigning a central vowel to this set (Boberg, 2009, 2010). Some vocabulary words are either unique to Canadian English or used differently relative to their meanings in either American or British English (or both) (Boberg, 2010; Walker, 2015). The stereotypical Canadian eh? tag question, while it is in decline in urban dialects, has long enjoyed a prominent role as a marker of identity for English-speaking Canadians (Denis, 2013). Few other distinguishing morphosyntactic elements of normative Canadian English exist – though one that has started receiving attention is the ‘done my homework’ construction, in which done, finished, and (in some regions) started can take direct objects, which is widespread and unremarkable in Canadian English but rare and marked in the United States (Fruehwald & Myler, 2015; Yerastov, 2012). The regional varieties of Canadian English best-known for diverging from the normative fall into two categories: those located in the easternmost provinces (Boberg, 2010; Childs & Van Herk, 2014; Clarke, 2010, 2017; Dollinger, 2019; Labov et al., 2006) and those with a very different settlement history (e.g., Pringle & Padolsky, 1983). Newfoundland and Labrador, at the extreme eastern edge of the continent, is a case of both. While the other three Atlantic provinces joined Canada early on, Newfoundland and Labrador – geographically remote, largely settled by Irish and southwestern England emigrants – was a politically separate British colony that did not become a part of Canada until 1949; this has left it with well-known nonstandard varieties of English (Boberg, 2010; Childs et al., 2010; Childs & Van Herk, 2014; Clarke, 2010, 2017; Dollinger & Clarke, 2012; Walker, 2015, p. 57). Regional words, sayings, phrases, and even verb inflection (I loves it) are stigmatized (Clarke, 2010), but have also become commodified for tourists (Childs & Van 30
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Herk, 2014). That said, the English used in the urban area of St. John’s is not necessarily so different from normative Canadian English (Boberg, 2010; Chambers, 2012; Clarke, 2017). Likewise, rumours abound that Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia is audibly Scottish-sounding, but this is a stereotype rather than a reality (Gardner, 2017). Québec English, where it exists, is often thought of as being heavily affected by French, but evidence does not support this; contact-induced change in Montreal and Québec City appears to be limited to a small number of lexical items used only occasionally (Poplack et al., 2006). Where Québec English differs from normative Canadian English in terms of phonetic/phonological features, this tends to be attributable to lags affecting changes in progress (for an overview, see Friesner et al., 2021). Québec City English and other peripheral minority dialects of English do tend to be slightly more divergent than Montreal English is from the normative Canadian baseline – attributable to a greater degree of insulation from the anglophone surroundings – but, again, this typically takes the form of delays in ongoing changes such as the Canadian Shift (Friesner et al., 2021) or the merry-marry-Mary merger (Boberg, 2010; Boberg & Hotton, 2015). Sali A. Tagliamonte’s extensive Ontario Dialects Project has been conducting sociolinguistic interviews to document and compare the English dialects of rural/northern Ontario. These frequently differ from the highly urbanized south of the province in terms of economic bases, settlement patterns, values, and/or regional identities (e.g., Tagliamonte, 2014; Schlegl & Tagliamonte, 2021). Several researchers have been taking a deep look at multiculturalism and its relationship with Canadian English. In Montreal, Boberg (2004, 2014) has documented English-language ethnolects in the Italian and Jewish populations, stemming from the way in which Montrealers tend to speak French together but use English in insular clusters with people of similar backgrounds. Although Jewish Montrealers are beginning to sound more like the British/Irish baseline, their counterparts of Italian descent are differentiating themselves further (Boberg, 2014; Friesner et al., 2021; Kettig & Winter, 2017). In Toronto, Hoffman and Walker (2010) examined a cross-section of English speakers by ethnic/racial/cultural background, finding subtle differentiation. Elsewhere within the city, building in part on Baxter and Peters (2011), Denis (2021) and collaborators (Bigelow et al., 2020) have been documenting the emergence of a multiethnolect, Multicultural Toronto English, in several parts of the suburbs. Found among the young-adult children of immigrants from an assortment of homelands, the multiethnolect bears particular influence from Jamaican Patwa and Somali (see also Hinrichs, 2014 on Jamaican-Canadians and Lacoste, 2021 on Haitian-Canadians). In Vancouver, Babel and Russell (2015) have uncovered evidence of implicit racial bias in a perception study. They find that pairing voices with images of non-white faces makes listeners perceive an illusory degree of nonstandardness in the Canadian English being spoken – underlining the dismissal of ethnic/racial/cultural minorities that is still deeply embedded in the Canadian settler-colonial mindset, and which cannot be overlooked.
Canadian French French in Canada is far from monolithic. A broad division is usually drawn between Laurentian French (that is, Québec French) and Acadian French (spoken in the Atlantic provinces) (Cichocki, 2012; Côté, 2012; Dubois, 2005). To the west, varieties of Ontario French and pockets dotted throughout the western provinces are generally described as offshoots of Québec French (Valdman et al., 2005, Côté, 2012, Mougeon, 2014). In terms of numbers and political power, Québec is the focal point (Auger, 2005). While Acadia’s francophone settlements are older, Québec is the only place in North America that has a 31
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continuous urban Francophone history dating back as far as the 17th century (Valdman et al., 2005; Auger, 2005); it was also a major source of further francophone exploration and expansion into the North American continent thereafter (Auger, 2005; for more sources, see Côté, 2012). Since 1977, the effects of Bill 101 in Québec have boosted the profile of French considerably and ensured better protection for language rights among Québec francophones, though some sense of precarity has remained (Auger, 2005). The Office québecois de la langue français (OQLF) in Québec enforces laws about French signage, disseminates materials about French-language usage, and creates French terms in attempts to discourage the use of anglicismes (i.e., loanwords from English) (see Auger, 2005). All this serves to promote Québec French as something worthy of respect in its own right, though there are two major potential sources of linguistic insecurity: oppression from the anglophone majority within Canada, and disparaging remarks from prescriptivists in France about colonial dialects of the language (Auger, 2005). The earliest Europeans in Québec came from a mix of places in France, “with substantial numbers of settlers from north of the Loire Valley” (Balcom et al., 2008, p. 1), but were soon cut off from the homeland and subjected to attempted linguistic and cultural assimilation from the British (see Nadeau & Barlow, 2006) Today, a number of factors differentiate Québec French from the standard French of France – though not many of them are morphosyntactic (Auger, 2005, p. 68), and among the ones that are, ostensible similarities to English are not automatically evidence of contact-induced change (Blondeau, 2008; Poplack & Levey, 2010; Poplack et al., 2012). Some of the characteristic features of Québec French listed by Auger (2005) include: affrication/assibilation of /t/ and /d/ before high front vowels and the semivowels /j/ and /ɥ/ (see also Côté, 2012; Friesner, 2010; Poirier, 2014); lexical items that have become archaic in France, such as asteure rather than maintenant for ‘now’ and noirceur for either ‘night’ or ‘obscurity’; the pronunciation of the pronouns moi and toi, [mwa] and [twa] in standard French, as per the older options [mwe] and [twe]; the retention of several vowel distinctions becoming lost in France; and an innovative postverbal clitic -tu in questions and exclamations. The phoneme /r/ in Montreal French has undergone a change in progress: the older apical trill [r] has been replaced by uvular [ʁ], which in the early 20th century was much more characteristic of eastern Québec (Sankoff & Blondeau, 2007; see also Côté, 2012). In spite of the OQLF, some loanwords from English are regularly used in Québec French, especially those involving technology and/or transportation (Auger, 2005), though these are not always the same as English loanwords found in France. As with Montreal English, there is some evidence emerging of ethnolects in Montreal French (Blondeau & Friesner, 2014). One of the most historically stigmatized varieties of Québec French is joual, a working-class Montreal sociolect (Auger, 2005, p. 66; Comeau & King, 2011). Starting in the 1960s, joual received media attention and was frequently slammed as supposedly defective (Auger, 2005, p. 66). As part of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the use of joual became more of a symbol of pride (Comeau & King, 2011, p. 183, n. 4), and began appearing in sympathetic depictions in literature (Balcom, 2008). Farther east, the varieties of French spoken in the Atlantic provinces are collectively known as Acadian French, after the name of the original French colony in the area (Acadie, ‘Acadia’). This label also usually includes varieties from adjacent areas of the province of Québec, such as the Gaspé Peninsula north of New Brunswick and the small Îles-de-la-Madeleine in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (Balcom et al., 2008; Cichocki, 2012; Comeau et al., 2016). The original Acadians were the first French speakers to establish permanent colonies in what is now Canada, beginning in 1604 (for a historical overview, see Cichocki, 2012). To this day, Acadian culture and identity are strong and distinct (Boudreau, 2009; Comeau & King, 2011). 32
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The split between Québec and Acadia is old, deep, and asymmetrical. French speakers in Québec have long had the upper hand; Acadians are less numerous, and their dialects of French more stigmatized. One consequence is that Acadians are faced with linguistic opposition both from Québec and from the broader situation of anglophone Canada opposite francophone Canada (Comeau & King, 2011). Linguistic insecurity is thus common among Acadian French speakers (Boudreau, 2009; Boudreau & Dubois, 1991; King, 2008). Many reasons underlie the differences between Québec and Acadian varieties. Most of the original Acadian settlers were from the Centre-Ouest region of France, while the French-speaking founders of Québec were from a wider range of locales (Balcom et al., 2008; Dubois, 2005; Friesner, 2010; King, 2008). Isolation from other French varieties, and sometimes from Frenchlanguage education, has led to the preservation of some phenomena that became obsolescent in normative varieties of French, as well as to the inception of new changes not necessarily shared with Québec (Balcom et al., 2008; Comeau & King, 2011; King, 2008). On top of that, the extent of contact with English varies dramatically in the Atlantic provinces – to the point that Acadian French is something of a natural laboratory for language contact in comparative perspective (Balcom et al., 2008; Comeau et al., 2016). There are small numbers of French speakers in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, but most of the speakers of Acadian French live in New Brunswick (Dubois, 2005, p. 88; King, 2008, p. 140; Cichocki, 2012, pp. 211–212). The north of the province is overwhelmingly francophone; in the more populous south, French and English are in constant contact (Dubois, 2005, pp. 86–87; Comeau & King, 2011, p. 182; Cichocki, 2012, pp. 211–212). The variety usually singled out for attention is chiac, used in and around the city of Moncton and known for its English-influenced loanwords, calques, grammatical structures, and discourse markers (see King, 2008 for an in-depth review of additional research). Crucially, King (2008) points out that chiac is not necessarily unique in the region (see also Auger, 2005), and that there is a risk of overestimating the degree of impact of English on Acadian French in general (see also Papen, 2014). Chiac has been the subject of considerable derision (Boudreau, 2009). However, its representation in literature and the media is beginning to bring it increased respectability and status; it sometimes serves as a marker of local identity (King, 2008, 2017; see also Boudreau, 2009; Comeau & King, 2011; Papen, 2014). Phonological features of Acadian French include: palatalization of /k/, /g/, /t/, and /d/, raising of mid back vowels to /u/, lowering of /ɛ/ before rhotics, and metathesis of the nominative first-person singular pronoun je to ej (see Cichocki, 2012; Dubois, 2005; and King, 2008). Very little Québec affrication/assibilation occurs in Acadian French (Cichocki, 2012). There are local words, such as abrier for couvrir ‘cover’ and bailler for donner ‘give’ (Dubois, 2005). In terms of morphosyntax, speakers of Acadian French may preserve a verbal suffix -ont [ɔ̃] or [᷈ɑ] that indicates agreement with third-person plural subjects – a stereotypically Acadian vestige from the homeland that has since been lost in France to a phonologically null -ent (Beaulieu & Cichocki, 2008; Dubois, 2005; King, 2008; King et al., 2004). There is also use of je . . . ons for a nominative first-person plural pronoun and matching verb agreement (King, 2008; King et al., 2004) rather than the nous . . . ons of normative French. The periphrastic past tense in standard French features a split between two auxiliaries – generally avoir ‘have’, but être ‘be’ for a handful of reflexive and/or unaccusative verbs; Acadian French uses far more avoir with these than Québec French does (Dubois, 2005), and may regularize some verbs that are irregular in other dialects of French (Dubois, 2005). The passé simple, an inflectional past tense, is better preserved in Acadian French than in the many other dialects where it has become obsolescent in speech (Comeau et al., 2012; King, 2008). 33
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With far fewer speakers, varieties of Acadian French outside New Brunswick have received less attention. However, case studies of isolated varieties may uncover features that other dialects have lost: this has recently been the case for western Newfoundland (Butler & King, 2008) and for southern Nova Scotia (Comeau, 2020; Comeau et al., 2016).
Heritage languages Beginning from Dollinger’s (2019) estimate of the number of languages used in Canada and subtracting both the official languages and Indigenous languages still leaves more than 200 aside from English and French: these are additional languages that have been brought from elsewhere. It is worth pointing out that at least two of these are sign languages – American Sign Language and Langue des signes québécoise/Québec Sign Language – though the ramifications of their 2019 legal recognition by the Government of Canada relative to the treatment of Indigenous languages (a group that include several additional sign languages) are very complex (Snoddon & Wilkinson, 2019). The most well-represented heritage languages in Canada are currently – in descending order – Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi, Spanish, Tagalog, Arabic, Italian, German, Urdu, and Farsi (Statistics Canada, 2017b, p. 2). At the other end of the scale, an effort has arisen (Endangered Language Alliance Toronto, 2021) to conduct documentary fieldwork on languages found in Canada that are endangered in their respective homelands. The Heritage Language Variation and Change project led by Naomi Nagy has been investigating ten heritage languages found across multiple generations of people (i.e., immigrants and their descendants) in the Toronto area. Nagy (2018) summarizes research produced to date in heritage varieties of Cantonese, Faetar, Italian, Korean, Russian, and Ukrainian. There are some cases of parallelism between heritage and homeland varieties and some of disparities (Nagy, 2018, p. 438). As with Canadian French, a necessary note is that differences in the heritage variety do not automatically signal changes instigated by contact with English. So far, there is only one combination of a feature and a language – voice-onset time in heritage Russian – that can be straightforwardly attributed to this mechanism (Nagy, 2018, p. 438). There is also often no self-explanatory relationship between linguistic behaviour and ethnic orientation, i.e., individual speakers’ identification with and/or practice of the heritage culture (Nagy, 2018; Nagy & Gadanidis, 2022). These findings suggest a complex, multifaceted landscape of heritage languages in the Canadian context, and ample room for additional probing of nuance – which an increasingly multicultural Canada will continue to be well-suited to provide.
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Sociolinguistics in Canada Baxter, L., & Peters, J. (2011). Black English in Toronto: A new dialect? Paper presented at methods in dialectology XIV, August 2–6, 2011. University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. Beaulieu, L., & Cichocki, W. (2008). La flexion postverbale -ont en français acadien: Une analyse sociolinguistique [The verbal suffix -ont in Acadian French: A sociolinguistic analysis]. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 53(1), 35–62. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100000888 Bigelow, L., Gadanidis, T., Schlegl, L., Umbal, P., & Denis, D. (2020). Why are wasteyutes a ting? University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 26(3), Article 3. Blondeau, H. (2008). The dynamics of pronouns in the Québec languages in contact dynamics. In M. Meyerhoff & N. Nagy (Eds.), Social lives in language – sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities: Celebrating the work of Gillian Sankoff (pp. 249–271). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ impact.24.17blo Blondeau, H., & Friesner, M. (2014). Manifestations phonétiques de la dynamique des attributions ethnolinguistiques à Montréal [Phonetic signals of the dynamics of ethnolinguistic categories in Montreal]. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 59(1), 83–105. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0008413100000165 Boberg, C. (2004). Ethnic patterns in the phonetics of Montreal English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8(4), 538–568. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2004.00273.x Boberg, C. (2009). The emergence of a new phoneme: Foreign (a) in Canadian English. Language Variation and Change, 21(3), 355–380. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394509990172 Boberg, C. (2010). The English language in Canada: Status, history and comparative analysis. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511781056 Boberg, C. (2014). Ethnic divergence in Montreal English. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 59(1), 55–82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100000153 Boberg, C., & Hotton, J. (2015). English in the Gaspé region of Quebec. English World-Wide, 36(3), 277–314. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.36.3.01bob Boudreau, A. (2009). La construction des représentations linguistiques: Le cas de l’Acadie [The construction of linguistic representations: The case of Acadia]. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 54(3), 439–459. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100004606 Boudreau, A., & Dubois, L. (1991). L’insécurité linguistique comme entrave à l’apprentissage du français [Linguistic insecurity as a barrier to French language learning]. Journal of the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics/Bulletin de l’Association canadienne de linguistique appliquée, 13(2), 37–50. Butler, G. R., & King, R. (2008). The French discourse marker mais dame: Past and present functions. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 53(1), 63–82. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S000841310000089X Chambers, J. K. (1973). Canadian raising. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 18(2), 113–135. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100007350 Chambers, J. K. (1986). Three kinds of standard in Canadian English. In W. C. Lougheed (Ed.), In search of the standard in Canadian English (Strathy language unit occasional papers, No. 1) (pp. 1–15). Strathy Language Unit, Queen’s University. Chambers, J. K. (2012). Homogeneity as a sociolinguistic motive in Canadian English. World Englishes, 31(4), 467–477. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-971X.2012.01774.x Childs, B., De Decker, P., Deal, R., Kendall, T., Thorburn, J., Williamson, M., & Van Herk, G. (2010). Stop signs: The intersection of interdental fricatives and identity in Newfoundland. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 16(2), Article 5. Childs, B., & Van Herk, G. (2014). Work that -s!: Drag queens, gender, identity, and traditional Newfoundland English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(5), 634–657. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12094 Cichocki, W. (2012). An overview of the phonetics and phonology of Acadian French spoken in northeastern New Brunswick (Canada). In R. Gess, C. Lyche & T. Meisenburg (Eds.), Phonological variation in French: Illustrations from three continents (pp. 211–233). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.11.12cic Clarke, S. (2010). Newfoundland and labrador English. Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.3366/ edinburgh/9780748626168.001.0001 Clarke, S. (2017). Local vs. supralocal: Preserving language and identity in Newfoundland. In C. Montgomery & E. Moore (Eds.), Language and a sense of place: Studies in language and region (pp. 65–86). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316162477.017 Clarke, S., Elms, F., & Youssef, A. (1995). The third dialect of English: Some Canadian evidence. Language Variation and Change, 7(2), 209–228. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500000995
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Marisa Brook Tagliamonte, S. A. (2014). System and society in the evolution of change: The view from Canada. In E. Green & C. F. Meyers (Eds.), The variability of current world Englishes (pp. 199–238). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110352108.199 Turcotte, M. (2019). Results from the 2016 Census: English-French bilingualism among Canadian children and youth. Insights on Canadian society (Statistics Canada). https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/75006-x/2019001/article/00014-eng.pdf?st=EumUn4T6 Valdman, A., Auger, J., & Piston-Hatlen, D. (2005). Introduction. In A. Valdman, J. Auger, & D. PistonHatlen (Eds.), Le français en Amérique du Nord: État présent [French in North America: Its current state] (pp. 1–35). Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Walker, J. A. (2015). Canadian English: A sociolinguistic perspective. Routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203551431 Yerastov, Y. (2012). Transitive be perfect: An experimental study of Canadian English. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 57(3), 427–457.
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3 SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH INTO INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES OF NORTH AMERICA Éedaa Heather Dawn Burge, Shayleen Macy EagleSpeaker, Jaeci Nel Hall, Amanda Cardoso and Gabriela Pérez Báez Introduction Indigenous languages of North America have been spoken or signed across the continent since time immemorial. Many themes central to sociolinguistics – including dialectology, language variation, language contact, ethnographies of language use, and social networks – are also central to Indigenous language revitalization movements and the interdisciplinary work that supports them. Despite this, Indigenous methodologies, ideologies, and theoretical perspectives are largely absent from sociolinguistics (though see, e.g., Jacobsen & Thompson, 2020 and Leonard, 2020). This chapter, new to The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World second edition, reviews work focusing on Indigenous languages within Canada and the United States from multiple disciplines and highlights topics relevant to sociolinguistics. Our chapter builds connections across Indigenous North American language scholarship that contribute to sociolinguistic investigations across all languages. The scholarship and the scholars discussed here come from diverse traditions, are Indigenous and non-Indigenous university-trained authors (reflected in this chapter’s authorship), and Indigenous Elders and community leaders trained within their respective cultures. This chapter integrates diverse and multi-disciplinary perspectives that have profound and exciting implications for sociolinguistic theory and methods, and while we address macro- and micro-sociolinguistic topics, it is not organized around this dichotomy. Our scope is necessarily narrowed to Indigenous languages within Canada and the US. However, we acknowledge that the current national and political boundaries are artificially imposed by colonial and nation-state building projects upon the myriad Indigenous communities present. We are unable to explicitly address the impacts that geopolitical borders have on Indigenous communities and their languages, though we do consider languages impacted by them, such as Tohono O’odham, Lingít and Kickapoo. An added complication is that geopolitical labels are not consistently used. For instance, the term ‘North America’ sometimes includes Mexico (e.g., Glottolog) and sometimes excludes it (e.g., Endangered Languages Project). Further, the US and Canada are quite different in themselves and within each, vast regional differences exist. We recommend visiting https://native-land.ca as an example of community territories and their languages, as reported by Indigenous communities themselves. While we endeavor to cover the wide breadth of intellectual traditions across North America, and provide detail enough to be useful, we will undoubtedly miss important nuances.
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We describe diversity in North America, including languages and the importance of multilingualism in Indigenous communities, and the agency and roles of community members in historical and contemporary documentation, revitalization, and research. Next, we focus on the relevance of centering Indigenous perspectives and methodologies in sociolinguistic work. Finally, we discuss the implications that work grounded in Indigenous perspectives has for sociolinguistics.
Diversity We present the concept of diversity broadly construed to include linguistic diversity, and the diversity of roles in various aspects of language work across contexts. Sixty distinct language families and isolates have been identified in North America to date encompassing 330 known languages (Mithun, 2022), including numerous Sign languages (Rice, 2020). These languages are considered to constitute 10 cultural and linguistic areas: Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, Plateau, Great Basin, California, Southwest, Great Plains, Northeast, and Southeast (Sturtevant, 1998), with language families cutting across cultural areas and cultural traits being shared across language families. Na-Dene languages are located within the subarctic area, the Pacific Coast, and the Southwest. Twenty-two language families are known in California, and a dozen genetic units in the Northwest Coast, where contact and multilingualism dates to ancient times (Mithun, 2017). The Great Plains encompasses languages from six large language families (Mithun, 2017). Language contact has promoted the emergence of lingua francas such as Mobilian Jargon of the Southeast, Chinuk Wawa/Chinook Jargon of the Northwest Coast, and Plains Indian (or American Indian) Sign Language (PIL) of the Great Plains and the Northeast (Davis, 2021). PIL is used by both deaf and hearing community members (Davis, 2021). Linguistic diversity in North America is reflected in the plurilingual nature of Indigenous North American language communities, the linguistic repertoires of their members, and their roles in language documentation and revitalization, as discussed in the following sections.
Language authorities Centering the role of a native language user who has a culturally significant role within a language community is of relevance across Indigenous communities and various terms are used to refer to it. EagleSpeaker (2019) and Hall (2021) use the term language authority to refer to the first-known Indigenous scholars, Indigenous researchers, and Indigenous archivists of their community’s language revitalization efforts. Often, they are Elders who provide language learning opportunities for their communities by sharing their linguistic knowledge. In situations where the language has no L1 users and the community must use documentation data for revitalization, a language authority credits the community member who preserved the language through documentation. Carpenter (2019) uses ‘intellectual authority’ and ‘Indigenous expert’, stating, “[t]he many manuscripts and notebooks at the [American Philosophical Society] Library produced by anthropologists studying Indigenous peoples are fundamentally based upon the knowledge and expertise of the individual Indigenous person who communicated that knowledge”. Other terms used include ‘Elder’, ‘language expert’, ‘knowledge bearer’, or ‘knowledge keeper’ referring to roles that are likely universal across Indigenous communities. The Council on Aboriginal Initiatives (2012, pp. 9–10) explain that in English, the word ‘Elder’ does not express the role’s cultural significance, stating: The concept of an Elder in the Aboriginal community is sometimes a difficult one for nonAboriginal people to understand. The difference is in the language: In English, it is a title; 40
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a noun. In Indigenous languages, it is a verb that describes a role. . . . Consequently, the English word ‘Elder’ does not capture the full meaning of Kahteyak, or describe what a person does. Language authority is used in a distinct yet related context by the First Peoples’ Cultural Council (FPCC) to refer to, “a group that could include Elders, community educators, language champions and any others who are committed to helping the language thrive in the community”. (FPCC, 2013, p. 19). Here, the term refers to roles within organization-led initiatives developed for language planning and maintenance. The FPCC’s use of language authority on an organizational level is related to this term’s concept used at an individual level, as both are founded within culturally based Indigenous language protocols and ethics and adapted within the language preservation context. The FPCC’s definition also carries similar duties regarding a culturally relevant leadership role, including assuring that access to language learning and language resources is open to Indigenous community members, language revitalization is collaborative, and the community is central to the effort (FPCC, 2013, p. 19). Language authority here is meant to recenter language research to acknowledge and include Indigenous intellectual expertise and to recognize those community members who contributed, or continue to contribute to the documentary record and academic literature. In academia, these roles have been termed ‘informant’, ‘participant’, ‘consultant’, or ‘tribal consultant’, but these can relegate cultural leaders to the ‘researcher’s subject’ role and do not espouse Indigenous knowledge systems nor recognize the individual’s agency as Carpenter (2019) describes: Archival repositories have also relegated or left out information about the particular Indigenous people who are the sources for a range of reasons, from the mundane to the racist. Among these are the traditional representations of Indigenous peoples as a subject matter rather than as intellectual authorities and as the archives’ constituencies. Another reason is the habit of only crediting authorship to the recorders of Indigenous knowledge and not to those who knew it, communicated it, and looked after it. The use of the term ‘language informant’ may convey a sense of passivity, which obscures the agentive reality of people knowledgeable about language. Within their wisdom about the importance of the traditional knowledge systems, language authorities are knowledgeable about their languages and the implications of documenting languages for future generations (Carson Viles and Jerome Viles, personal communication, 2019). They make agentive decisions about preserving their languages, despite working within the historical context of ‘salvage linguistics’, which has profoundly impacted communities by supporting and presenting a negative image through documentation projects that were systematically extractive in nature (Younker, 2003). Today, the sociopolitical contexts may be different, but the agency and commitment of language authorities are a constant that deserves acknowledgement. As the terminology for language authority was developed, the Western concept of an ‘authority’ was deliberately chosen to challenge settler colonial ideals and systems that promote non-Indigenous researchers as experts or ‘authorities’ on topics related to investigations into Indigenous knowledge systems. Unfortunately, these colonial intellectual norms of the researcher-subject dichotomy are systemically coupled with unequal power dynamics that persist across academia (Smith, 2012). The use of this terminology and discussion here is not meant to prescribe terminology upon individual Indigenous communities, but to incite academia to center Indigenous language users who have preserved their language and to honor their role and contributions. This discussion 41
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importantly highlights the need for academia to be aware of this role and to be sensitive to the diverse ways communities choose to label this role. It is ultimately up to each community to decide what title and role members assume within the movements, and communities will use terms they deem best suited for their purposes.
Complex roles in language revitalization Recognizing language authorities’ importance also requires recognizing the second language (L2) learners’ role. For some, the division between language authority and L2 user seems quite clear, but it becomes blurred when L2 users become increasingly active in revitalization leadership roles. L2 users who are actively producing the language within the frame of revitalization goals and methods may be referred to as ‘learner-speakers’, ‘language revitalization practitioners’, or ‘learner-practitioners’. ‘Learner-speaker’ has been used to acknowledge the learner’s knowledge and linguistic work while also noting the difference in linguistic knowledge between the learner and L1 speakers (Hall, 2021). ‘Language revitalization practitioner’ and ‘learner-practitioner’ have also been used to acknowledge that community members hold many roles within language revitalization contexts (e.g. learner, speaker, teacher, researcher, activist, manager, community member, etc.), and that the work is varied and complex (Taylor-Adams, 2022). Language revitalization practitioners (or practitioners) of Indigenous North American languages often do not have sufficient resources and infrastructure to meet individuals’ and communities’ revitalization goals and are met with several challenges in their efforts. They may lack access to L1 speakers, lack access to language documentation (physical and intellectual access), and/ or lack infrastructure to support the language. Therefore, practitioners often must take on many complex roles in the preservation, transmission, and creation of language resources. Practitioners navigate through variation in documentation, limited language data, and the pressure of meeting community-driven objectives while adhering to community protocols. While many practitioners are conscious that L2 and L1 language use will be different, they may strive to balance engaging in active language production and transmission with producing language use that will be perceived as ‘correct’ in response to language shift. Practitioners must also manage the awareness that while they breathe life into their language, they are also changing it, and face reactions that this might generate within and outside the community.
Multilingualism Linguistic diversity and language contact has resulted in multilingualism in North America, a facet of both linguistic characteristics and social culture, which is amply documented in historical language data. A clear example is Q’əltéː Charles Cultee who provided linguistic data to Franz Boas in 1890–91 for the documentation of the Pacific Northwestern Chinook language (Chinook Proper). Boas and Cultee (1894, p. 6) describe Q’əltéː as “a veritable storehouse of information”, stating: His mother’s mother was a Kathlamat, and his mother’s father a [Quiláːpaχ]; his father’s mother was a Clatsop, and his father’s father a Tinneh of the interior. His wife was a Chehalis and at present he speaks Chehalis most exclusively this being also the language of his children. He has lived for a long time in Kathlamet, on the southern bank of the Columbia River, his mother’s town, and for this reason speaks the Kathlamet dialect as well as the Chinook dialect. 42
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We foreground two important points about multilingualism. First, multilingualism has persisted despite policies that continue to promote monolingualism (Truth & Reconciliation Commission, 2015). Societal and governmental pressures privilege colonial languages over Indigenous languages. This is seen, for instance, in concerns raised about English learning deficits in language immersion despite these concerns having been dispelled (Fortune, 2012). Nevertheless, cultural contact across Indigenous North American peoples led to multilingualism that remains present in the memory and practices of communities today. Further, contemporary efforts by Indigenous communities to document and revitalize their languages may entail multilingualism. Second, many theoretical questions about multilingualism and language documentation remain unaddressed. For instance, the language data provided by Charles Cultee must have shown multilingualism effects which were not adequately documented. More interestingly, it is not well-known how Indigenous people have conceptualized variation fostered by multilingualism (Montler, 1999), how linguistic units are expressed across languages in proximity and with continuous transfer, and the relevance for areal linguistics.
Sociolinguistic variation Centering the individual is common for work with Indigenous North American languages, in part, resulting from a richer knowledge of individuals’ background and social experiences while ensuring that individuals are represented and not swept into groups. The types of language resources and data available also often lend well to this. This focus complements sociolinguistic variation work, which tends to foreground groups over individuals to understand how variation patterns across and within language communities. We highlight both work on group-level and individual variation, and, crucially, how individuals have been centered in this work. Recent investigations of Indigenous North American languages’ linguistic properties indicate high degrees of individual variation, which is also reported for other language communities with similar historical and sociopolitical contexts, and population sizes (Babel, 2009; Spence, 2016). Individual variation is often not collapsed into groups, precisely because the individual represents an important and unique set of social characteristics that differs from others in the language community, especially when there are few language users. For example, ʔayʔaǰuθəm vowels and fricatives are highly variable in production and perception resulting from both phonological conditioning and user-specific patterns (Mellesmoen & Huijsmans, 2019; Mellesmoen & Babel, 2020; Mellesmoen & Cardoso, under review). Similar findings are reported for Secwepemctsín (Kamigaki-Baron, 2021) and Ktunaxa (Liu, 2022) vowels. This work centers the individual in the analysis and by engaging in a collaborative process or with data collection where researchers serve multiple roles (e.g. language users and researchers). Group-level variation and changes are also demonstrated with regards to region, age, gender, and language contact effects. Palakurthy (2023) and Stanford and Preston (2009) overview variation and change in Indigenous languages in North America and elsewhere. Regional variation at different linguistic levels (sound structures, lexical, and grammatical) is shown for Dene (Jacobsen, 2017; Palakurthy, 2019), Tlingit (Crippen, 2019; Cardoso et al., 2022, https://tlingitlanguage. com/the-tlingit-language/), and Yuman (Field, 2012), and for languages in the Algonquian language family (Clarke, 2009; Mackenzie, 1980; Valentine, 1995, www.atlas-ling.ca), among others. Age-related variation and change are described for SENĆOŦEN consonants (Bird & Kell, 2017), such as weak ejectives changing to strong ones (Bird, 2015), and Diné bizaad affricates, which change to similar English sounds for some younger speakers, but not for others (Palakurthy, 2020). This is partially due to many current L2 language learner-teachers and language contact. 43
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McCarty (2014) discusses youth language practices in current Indigenous language contexts and the relevance to language planning and learning. We see discussions of variation and language contact. For example, Michif vowel pronunciations do not differ between French origin and Plains Cree origin words (Rosen et al., 2020). Language change is shown for some Indigenous languages, such as for Washo vowels (Yu, 2008), consonants in Northern Paiute (Babel, 2009) and Menominee (Cudworth, 2019), Hupa lexical choices (Spence, 2016) and across multiple linguistic variables for Kwakʼwala (Goodfellow, 2005).
Multilingualism and variation in language documentation Individual and community variation is a central consideration that can be both culturally important and a potential point of tension. Exogamy traditions often unify families from different language communities and an individual might descend from multiple language communities. This presents a challenge for community researchers. Language is an important part of identity. Further, language community members recognize the importance of linguistic diversity, and take pride in it, working hard to pass it on. Archival documentation often includes scant or conflated information about multilingualism and variation because of insufficient metadata (Hall, 2021). Often information is also lacking about the linguistic repertoires of those who provided language for documentation, and how the language data itself relates to individuals or social categories. Additionally, variation was not systematically documented. Archives often constitute a small subset of language users, so individual rather than community variation is represented. The documentation of idiolects and overly narrow phonetic transcription exacerbate this challenge. Documentation of linguistic variation may be inaccessible. Archives are spread out with documentation occurring in various places, making it difficult to gather materials to analyze variation. Further, archival documentation tends to exhibit what appear as orthographic inconsistencies, which may reflect variation. However, this may also be due to a lack of familiarity with the language, a lack of formal training (i.e., researchers such as Christian school teachers), or the use of different conventions. While understanding multilingualism and variation is relevant to determine when orthographic differences reflect dialectal variation, often the original researchers and language authorities are no longer living. Therefore, no expert source who can clarify questions is available. This presents challenges for researchers analyzing the language data and L2 language learners who may feel pressure to focus on one dialect, or who may only have language resources (e.g., texts) from one dialect that does not reflect their individual or family’s linguistic repertoires. For example, the Nuu-wee-ya’ language contains three dialects each with multiple varieties (Golla, 2011; Hall, 2021). Archival materials were collected by multiple ethnographers at different times. The variation found within just one ethnographer’s notes is overwhelming. The communities connected to this language want to interpret what orthographic differences convey dialectal differences because these differences serve as badges of identity. Due to the archival data’s limitations, a full accounting of the variation is impossible. However, an analysis listing systematic differences in cognates as dialectal, and inconsistent differences as other sources of variation, reduces over 150 different ways in which documented cognates vary down to five consistent differences that reflect dialectal differences. This allows the Nuu-wee-ya’ communities to better use these resources, knowing what types of variation reflect dialects and determining that the remaining orthographic differences are reflective of other types of variation and may not be currently relevant to the community. 44
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An approach based on community goals and Indigenous methodologies proves useful in elucidating variation in archival data by focusing on solutions that address the community’s needs and leaving unanswered questions for future research. Part of the methodological difference comes from being clear about whom the work is for. Research done to help communities understand the variation found in archival materials has different goals than traditional variation research. The latter may be unattainable when working with just archival materials. However, research done with the desires of the community can circumnavigate the inconsistencies to create findings from what is available.
Indigenous perspectives For some Indigenous communities, the word ‘research’ has negative connotations (Smith, 1999), while for others it is being reclaimed (Wilson, 2008). This tension exists because of generations of extractive practices that positioned Indigenous people as research ‘subjects’ and did not benefit and often damaged communities (Younker, 2003). In contrast, Indigenous methodologies are frameworks that incorporate Indigenous worldviews and knowledge, and create space for Indigenous ideologies on their own terms while respecting others’ histories (Keliiaa, 2012). They represent “unique ways researchers use Indigenous positionality and perspective to perform research with and within Indigenous communities . . . [that] center and privilege the Indigenous community’s voice(s) in an effort to contribute to the community” (Windchief et al., 2017, p. 533). Indigenous knowledge is as diverse as the multitudes of sovereign communities from which the views originate. However, the centrality of relationality (i.e., the belief that ‘everything is related’; Wilson, 2008) is common to most. This is built on the Indigenous concept that ‘we are all related’ and thus to serve the community is to serve all of creation (Brayboy et al., 2012; Singh & Major, 2017). Relationality represents a shift from traditional research which often focused solely on the researcher’s and the academy’s goals and includes: i) acknowledging how the researcher is engaging with the community; ii) considering how the work serves the communities’ goals; and iii) the concept of reciprocity in which the researcher and community are mutually beneficial to one another. In addition to respect and responsibility, these principles are interwoven within each other. This understanding manifests in research directed towards supporting the collective rather than the individual. Wilson (2008) argues that research should be approached as one approaches ceremony. This includes “setting the stage properly . . . to be ready to step beyond the everyday and to accept a raised state of consciousness” (2008, p. 69). Considering research as ceremony opens researchers to alternative data collection forms, including intuition and dreams, and requires researchers to be attentive to different ways of knowing. When dealing with data that is full of holes, this type of data collecting becomes highly valuable and meaningful to a community. Another important principle is the use of Indigenous models to describe and define data (Hall, 2021). For example, the Four Directions and the number 4 are a sacred concept which can vary from culture to culture (or not exist at all) and is frequently used to encode an entity’s multiple components. Wilson’s Indigenous Research Paradigm (2001) uses the abstract concept of the four directions to represent four research components (i.e., ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology). These components are defined as “a label for a set of beliefs” (Wilson, 2001, pp. 175–176), which are “inseparable and blend from one into the next” (2008, p. 70). The four directions are used to illustrate a model of peacekeeping pedagogy (Calliou, 1995), as an education model (Roy, 1998), and to describe Indigenous social work practices (Absolon, 2010). When applied to language revitalization it can describe components of work necessary to fully practice language revitalization, such as: planning, processing, grammatical analysis, and creating and using in language (Hall, 2021). 45
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Language revitalization Language revitalization refers to efforts to support language use. Half the world’s known revitalization efforts are in North America (Belew & Simpson, 2018). In the Global Survey of Language Revitalization Efforts, 75 of 245 responses (28.6%) are in support of Indigenous North American languages (Pérez Báez et al., 2019). The survey documented efforts such as those for Anishinaabemowin that have “been going on since Elders resisted English and held onto [. . .] language and ceremonies”. Since 2001, the Waadookodaading Immersion School in Hayward, WI “has become a strong hold for immersion teaching” inspiring initiatives such as Ojibwemotadidaa Omaa Gidakiiminang, an adult immersion academy at the Fond du Lac Community College. In the US, the Native American Languages Act of 1990 protects Native languages in schools, stating that “the status of the cultures and languages of Native Americans is unique, and the United States has the responsibility to act together with Native Americans to ensure the survival of these unique cultures and languages”. In Canada, the Indigenous Languages Act of 2019 supports “the efforts of Indigenous Peoples to reclaim, revitalize, maintain and strengthen Indigenous languages”. Indigenous perspectives and methodologies are at the core of revitalization and have led to innovation in response to the diversity of language vitality contexts. Language nests, initially developed in Aotearoa for Māori, were adapted for Hawaiian and developed into extensive language immersion methods that reclaim the domain of schooling for revitalization (Baker, 2018, inter alia). Language teaching is a strong focus (Pérez Báez et al., 2019), leading to adapted and innovative second-language acquisition approaches. The Where Are Your Keys methodology was adapted to serve language revitalization in part from Karuk revitalizationists who themselves were applying the Total Physical Response method to revitalization (Gardner & Ciotti, 2018). The Root-Word Method for the documentation and teaching of polysynthetic languages was developed within the Onkwawén:na Kentyókhwa Adult Mohawk Language Immersion Program (Tonh et al., 2018). The Master-Apprentice program (Hinton et al., 2018) was developed specifically for languages with few users (Virtue et al., 2012). Belew and Simpson (2018) list 45 Indigenous North American languages that are or have been dormant, i.e., that at some point had no first-language users. Dormant language community’s members have challenged the assumption that without first-language users, a language would never be used again (Leonard, 2011) and have engaged in language revival, reclamation or awakening. “North America is the only region of the world in which a greater number of dormant languages have active revival efforts than not” (Belew & Simpson, 2018, p. 32). Home-based methodologies, which create micro-domains of language use to offset the challenge of language learning without a typical socialization context have been developed for languages such as Tolowa (Bommelyn & Tuttle, 2018) and Puyallup (Zahir, 2018). These approaches are shared with other language communities through the Multilingual Institute (https://pugetsalish.com/mi/). Language revitalization is fundamentally tied to the social inequality that groups of people have undergone. Therefore, revitalization must recognize this and center language communities and their members within any effort to ensure that any associated research and implementation responds to community interests and needs. Consequently, many institutes and organizations dedicated to language revitalization have Indigenous leadership in their faculty, staff and/or board. These include the First People’s Cultural Council, the Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute, the Indigenous Language Institute, the American Indian Language Development Institute, the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, and the Northwest Indian language Institute (Dwyer et al., 2018). 46
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Although language revitalization has sometimes been categorized under sociolinguistics, research on Indigenous languages and language reclamation should be more “than just topics of analysis” (Leonard, 2020, p. 89). Sociolinguistics does have many contributions to language revitalization, but it is also limiting to view revitalization as solely a sociolinguistic endeavour. Often for language revitalization practitioners, the practice of learning their language is like a ceremony (see Indigenous Perspectives). After all, revitalization is about “putting the world back together again” (Carson Viles, personal communication, 2018). As such, language revitalization is about ensuring continuity and repairing breaks, building capacity internally while growing the forest through cooperation, it is about sovereignty and self-determination, it is about language as one of many other aspects of life that, interwoven, sustain the lives of Indigenous peoples.
Decolonization through language Indigenous perspectives and methods in research and revitalization constitute a broad effort to revert the impact of settler-colonization. This is distinct from imperial colonialism, where the goal is resource extraction intent on benefiting one country (e.g., Britain) at the expense of the land and group being colonized (e.g., Africa). Contrastively, settler-colonization desires the land of the colonized itself. Indigenous peoples very existence threatens that end goal, and concepts such as terra nullius and manifest destiny, are used to legitimize genocide to take land and supplant the land with settlers, while providing them an origin myth (Wolfe, 2006 and Hixson, 2013). This has extensive effects for the colonized peoples, one of which is language shift. Language shift occurs when a language community replaces one language with another over time (Grenoble, 2012). Shift differs from language attrition, which involves language loss over an individual’s lifetime, often resulting from aging or language replacement and without having repercussions on the broader language community. Language shift has long been documented as a consequence of settler colonialism in Indigenous North America. For instance, Thomas Jefferson visited a place he referred to as Brookhaven, South Shore of Long Island in June 1791 and documented vocabulary items of the Unquachog language. Jefferson noted that, “There remained but three persons of this tribe now who can speak its language. They are old women. From two of these this voc. was taken. A young woman of the same tribe was also present who knew something of the language” (MS28, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution). It is also well documented that language shift directly resulted from atrocities perpetrated against Indigenous peoples within settler-colonial practices. In Canada and the US children were routinely separated from their families and placed in boarding or residential schools and other federal institutions where they lived in substandard conditions and were subjected to constant abuses. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRCC, 2015) reports that enrollment of Aboriginal children in residential schools increased steadily in the mid-1880s, peaking at over 10,000 children per year in the 1950s. The report states that “Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school-aged children in the general population” (2015, p. 1). Children were punished routinely for numerous reasons including speaking their Aboriginal languages (TRCC, 2010). By 2014, 3,201 deaths among children while in the care of boarding schools had been identified. In the US, the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report (Department of Justice: May 2022) describes a system of over 400 schools that “deployed systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies to attempt to assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children through education” which included “discouraging or preventing the use of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian languages, religions, and cultural practices” (2022, p. 6). The report recognizes that such practices 47
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were enforced through punishment including “solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing” (2022, p. 8). Indigenous methodological approaches focus on decolonization and, so, may be more likely to prioritize historical repair and social justice over strictly academic research. Yet, social and research goals are not incompatible. Indigenous research is aimed at advancing social justice and representation, with a view to opening the way for future Indigenous scholars. Further, academia can support decolonization through engagement and a genuine commitment to listen, understand and incorporate Indigenous perspectives into research, especially when Indigenous communities are involved. Following the principle of reciprocity, this engagement also benefits academia as it gains broader perspectives about world knowledge.
Implications for sociolinguistics Knowledge gained from the work described in this chapter has implications for sociolinguistics en masse. The diversity of sociolinguistic methods should parallel the diversity of languages, and theories should be developed with all types of languages and social contexts in mind. However, much of sociolinguistics focuses on a few languages, which are not representative of the world’s linguistic and social landscape. Work with Indigenous North American languages and advancements from it help to build more robust, cross-linguistically relevant theories, research practices and considerations, and broadens our methodological toolkit ensuring flexibility to engage with more kinds of linguistic data and social contexts. We also identify specific further developments that ensure work with Indigenous and underrepresented languages and communities plays a greater role in sociolinguistics, while understanding the wider important considerations for language communities. To begin, the study of contact among Indigenous North American languages may enrich language contact research. The contact phenomena across the Great Plains challenge assumptions about the type and sequence of borrowed linguistic material (Mithun, 2017), which suggests that borrowing occurs in currently undescribed ways. Therefore, revisiting what is likely to be borrowed and when, based on understanding specific language contact contexts furthers our explorations of borrowing processes within language contact situations. Implications for language variation and change investigations are extensive, including understanding the language user’s role, language models, and advancing methodological tools. Our understanding of produced and perceived variation by multilingual language users, and by individuals compared to groups has been broadened. For example, an investigation of phonetic transfer in Diné-English bilinguals enhances theories on bilingual phonology (Palakurthy, 2022). Contemporary archives-based revitalization research sheds light on best practices that contemporary documentary efforts should follow to ensure representation of variation. Furthermore, this work contributes to our understanding of heritage language models and variation that influences heritage language learning. Sociolinguistic discussions of heritage languages in North America are steadily expanding (Nagy, 2020). These largely focus on the immigration experience and generally include languages used at home (or those available to children) that are not the societies’ majority language(s) (Brown & Bousquette, 2018), but recently also include Indigenous languages (Fishman, 2001; Polinsky, 2018; Mellesmoen, 2021; Davis et al., in prep). This elucidates differences and commonalities across Indigenous minoritized languages in comparison to dominant international ones. Consideration is now given to multilingualism and variation in language learning contexts and associated L2 learning processes. Consideration of the role that language authorities and language users may have in heritage language contexts and language learning further informs this discussion. 48
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Questions around reference language models and implications for understanding social aspects of language learning are also investigated. Reference or “ideal” varieties may be “chosen” without transparency and/or consultation with or at the language community’s behest. Related to this choice is considering what variation is included or excluded in linguistic analysis (Davis et al., in prep), language dictionaries (Rice & Saxon, 2002), and language teaching materials (Miyashita & Chatsis, 2015; Hall & Déchaine, Ongoing). However, variation may be linguistically or culturally important for Indigenous communities, and so representing variation for language learners is an important consideration. For instance, the SENĆOŦENspeaking community considers pronunciation important in the language revitalization process and many adult learners aim to faithfully reproduce Elder’s speech (Bird and Kell, 2017). Therefore, considering existing variation in Indigenous language communities is important for learners and fluent language users from a theoretical (Palakurthy, 2023) and a language reclamation and revitalization perspective. Statistical analyses of low resource languages are lacking. Methods that have become relatively standardized (e.g., linear mixed effects models) and the assumptions underlying them do not necessarily hold for many languages. Indigenous language research often includes few language users, who represent a greater proportion of the population than is common in sociolinguistics. Therefore, that variation represents the entire language community better. Some recent work uses quantitative methods with low resource languages (Mellesmoen & Cardoso, under review), but we still need to significantly expand our methodological toolset. The implications are wide-ranging for historical sociolinguistics (Nevalainen, 2015), a relatively new subfield that advocates for understanding the historical data’s context. Soukup argues that no text can adequately be analyzed “without reference to the immediate, on-the-ground-level social context and situation within which it arose” (2017, p. 676) and that interactants in historical data “continually negotiate at least some such ‘meaning elements’ [. . .]. Missing out on their perspective is virtually disregarding the ‘elephant in the room’ regarding text interpretation” (2017, p. 675). Cardoso et al. (2022) use synchronic data to answer historical questions of Tlingit language change. The diversity among Indigenous North American languages must not only be considered an object of study. In keeping with the intent to center language communities in all endeavors, it is essential to center community efforts to revitalize their languages which follows from broader efforts to revitalize Indigenous cultures and societies. For this, understanding social structure and relevant social categories for language communities is essential. Nevalainen (2015) analyzes language transmission from a social networks’ perspective. Applications of similar approaches could prove fruitful in informing language revitalization practices. Relatedly, language vitality assessments, which are critical for adequate revitalization strategi, are heavily influenced by dominant international languages societies’ value systems. Assessment instruments that dominate sociolinguistics (UNESCO, 2003; Fishman, 1991; Lewis & Simons, 2010) award heavy value to endeavors such as literacy, publication and use of a language in schooling and other government-dominated domains, but little value to community-internal language use and socialization. They follow deficit models that measure what has been lost, rather than gained. As such, they are not relevant to the assessment of language revitalization gains. Much theorizing remains in the realm of language vitality assessment. Finally, language revitalization has led to innovation including technological advancements in community-led archives curation (Baldwin et al., 2016). The resources centered on community goals and needs also generate valuable resources for the analysis of language dynamics and change. They also stand as multi-purpose language resources upon which to build and to provide data for many of the analyses outlined here. 49
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Conclusion The inclusion of indigenous knowledge benefits academia in that diverse perspectives lead to new connections and new discoveries (Keane et al., 2017). Academia benefits further because acknowledging and making space for Indigenous voices addresses a darkness in institutions’ histories that comes from the treatment of Indigenous communities during research. Sociolinguistics must evolve through research that is inclusive of a wider range of languages, communities and perspectives.
References Absolon, K. (2010). Indigenous wholistic theory: A knowledge set for practice. First Peoples Child & Family Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Honouring the Voices, Perspectives, and Knowledges of First Peoples through Research, Critical Analyses, Stories, Standpoints and Media Reviews, 5(2), 74–87. Babel, M. (2009). The phonetic and phonological effects of obsolescence in Northern Paiute. In J. Stanford & D. Preston (Eds.), Variation in indigenous minority languages (pp. 23–46). John Benjamins. Baker, C. M. K. (2018). Hawaiian medium theatre and the language revitalization movement. In Routledge handbook of language revitalization (pp. 227–235). Routledge. Baldwin, D., Costa, D. J., & Troy, D. (2016). Myaamiaataweenki eekincikoonihkiinki eeyoonki aapisaataweenki: A Miami language digital tool for language reclamation. Language Documentation and Conservation, 10, 394–410. Belew, A., & Simpson, S. (2018). The status of the world’s endangered languages. In K. L. Rehg & L. Campbell (Eds.), Oxford handbook of endangered languages. Oxford University Press. Bird, S. (2015). Pronunciation change in the context of language revitalization: ejectives across four generations of SENC´ OŦEN speakers. Presented at 50th ICSNL. Vancouver. Bird, S., & Kell, S. (2017). The role of pronunciation in SENĆOŦEN language. Canadian Modern Language Review, 74(4), 538–569. Boas, F., & Cultee, C. (1894). Chinook texts. Government Printing Office. http://www.worldcat.org/ oclc/715620868 Bommelyn, P., & Tuttle, R. (2018). Tolowa Dee-ni’ language in our home. In L. Hinton, L. Huss, & G. Roche (Eds.), Routledge handbook of language revitalization (pp. 115–122). Taylor and Francis. Brayboy, B. M., Gough, H. R., Leonard, B., Roehl, R. F., & Solyom, J. A. (2012). Reclaiming scholarship: Critical Indigenous research methodologies. Qualitative research: An introduction to methods and designs, 423–450. Brown, J. R., & Bousquette, J. (2018). Heritage languages in North America: Sociolinguistic approaches. Journal of Language Contact, 11(2), 201–207. Calliou, S. (1995). Peacekeeping actions at home: A medicine wheel model for a peacekeeping pedagogy. First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds, 47–72. Cardoso, Amanda, Crippen, James, and Mellesmoen, Gloria. (2022). Cross-dialectal synchronic variation of a diachronic conditioned merger in Tlingit. Linguistics Vanguard, 8(5), 519–530. Carpenter, Brian. (2019). June 5. Finding Mrs. Mahone and Indigenous experts in the archives. American Philosophical Society. Catalogue of Endangered Languages (2022). University of Hawaii at Manoa. http://www.endangeredlanguages.com Clarke, S. (2009). Sociolinguistic stratification and new dialect formation in a Canadian Aboriginal community: Not so different after all? In J. Stanford & D. Preston (Eds.), Variation in indigenous minority languages (pp. 109–128). John Benjamins. Council on Aboriginal Initiatives. (2012). Elder protocol and guidelines. University of Alberta, Edmonton. Crippen, J. (2019). The syntax in tlingit verbs [PhD dissertation. University of British Columbia]. Cudworth, A. (2019). Menominee sibilants. Presented at Linguistic society of America annual meeting. New York. Davis, H., Huijsmans, M., & Mellesmoen, G. (in preparation). First nation languages as heritage languages. Davis, J. (2021). Translating American Indian Sign language from the 1800s to the present day. In A. Link, Abigail Shelton, Patrick Spero and Center for Native American Indigenous Research (Eds.), Indigenous languages and the promise of archives (pp. 156–188). University of Nebraska Press.
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Indigenous languages of North America Dwyer, Zepeda, Lachler, J., & Underriner, J. (2018). Training institutes for language revitalization. In Routledge handbook of language revitalization (pp. 61–69). Routledge. EagleSpeaker, Shayleen. (2019). A Kiksht revitalization model: Using linguistic materials and a digital platform to learn and teach a sleeping language. University of Oregon Master’s Project. Field, Margaret. (2012). Kumeyaay variation, group identity, and the land. International Journal of American Linguistics, 78(4), 557–573. First Peoples’ Cultural Council. (2013). A guide to language policy and planning for B.C. first nations communities. First Peoples’ Cultural Council. Fishman, A. J. (1991). Reversing language shift. Multilingual Matters Ltd. Fishman, A. J. (2001). 300-plus years of heritage language education in the United States. In J. K. Peyton, D. A. Ranard, & S. McGinnis (Eds.), Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource (pp. 81–89). Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems. Fortune, T. (2012). What research says about immersion. In Chinese language learning in the early grades: A handbook of resources and best practices for mandarin immersion. Asia Society. Gardner, E., & Ciotti, S. (2018). An overview of where are your keys?. In L. Hinton, L. Huss, & G. Roche (Eds.), Routledge handbook of language revitalization (pp. 137–145). Taylor and Francis. Golla, V. (2011). California Indian languages. University of California Press. Goodfellow, A. (2005). Talking in context: Language and identity in Kwakwaka’wakw society. McGillQueen’s University Press. Grenoble, L. (2012). Linguistic diversity. In C. Chapelle (Ed.), Encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Wiley Blackwell. Hall, J. (2021). Indigenous methodologies in linguistics: A case study of Nuu-wee-ya’ language revitalization [Doctoral dissertation, University of Oregon]. Hall, T., & Déchaine, R. (Ongoing). Haa Yoo Xh’atángi Daak Gaxhtootée: we will bring our language out into brightness partnership. Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M., & Bank, S. (2021). Glottolog 4.5. leipzig: Max planck institute for evolutionary anthropology. https://glottolog.org/ Hinton, L., Florey, M., Gessner, S., & Manatowa-Bailey, J. (2018). The master-apprentice language learning program. In L. Hinton, L. Huss, & G. Roche (Eds.), Routledge handbook of language revitalization (pp. 127–136). Taylor and Francis. Hixson, W. (2013). American settler colonialism: A history. Palgrave Macmillan. Jacobsen, K. (2017). The sound of navajo country: Music, language and Diné belonging. University of North Carolina Press. Jacobsen, K., & Thompson, K. F. (2020). “The right to lead”: Navajo language, discitizenship, and diné presidential politics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 24(1), 35–54. Kamigaki-Baron, M. (2021). Acoustic description of secwepemctsín vowels. Proceedings of ICSNL, 56, 134–153. Keane, M., Khupe, C., & Seehawer, M. (2017). Decolonising methodology: Who benefits from indigenous knowledge research?. Educational Research for Social Change, 6(1), 12–24. Keliiaa, C. (2012). Washiw Wagayay Maŋal: Reweaving the Washoe language. UCLA. ProQuest ID: Keliiaa_ucla_0031N_10441. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5s46ss0. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4zd060kz Leonard, W. (2011). Challenging ‘extinction’ through modern miami language practices. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35(2), 135–160. Leonard, W. (2020). Musings on Native American language reclamation and sociolinguistics. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 263, 85–90. Lewis, M. P., & Simons, G. F. (2010). Assessing endangerment: Expanding Fishman’s GIDS. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, 55(2), 103–120. Liu, S. (2022). Comparing Ktunaxa and English vowels. Unpublished. MacKenzie, M. (1980). Towards a dialectology of cree-montagnais-naskapi [PhD dissertation, University of Toronto]. McCarty, J. (2014). Negotiating sociolinguistic borderlands – Native youth language practices in space, time, and place. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 13(4), 254–267. Mellesmoen, G. (2021). Endangered languages as heritage languages: Divergent attainment and phonological regularization of diminutive reduplication in comox-sliammon (Salish). Presented at 12th ICNGL. https://www. mellesmoen.ca/research/talks/icngl12-divergent-attainment-heritage-languages-endangered-languages Mellesmoen, G., & Babel, M. (2020). Acoustically distinct and perceptually ambiguous: ʔayʔaǰuθəm (Salish) fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(4), 2959–2973.
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Burge, EagleSpeaker, Hall, Cardoso, and Pérez Báez Mellesmoen, G., & Cardoso, A. (under review). Contrast in the Comox – Sliammon vowel system. Mellesmoen, G., & Huijsmans, M. (2019). The relationship between pronunciation and orthography: Using acoustic analysis as a practical illustration of ʔayʔaǰuθəm (Comox-Sliammon) vowel quality. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of 19th ICPhS (pp. 979–983). Mithun, Marianne, 2017. Native North American languages. In R. Hickey (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of areal linguistics (pp. 878–933). Cambridge University Press. Mithun, Marianne, 2022. Native American languages at the threshold of the new millennium. In I. Krupnik (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 1, pp. 265–277). Open Monographs. Miyashita, Mizuki, and Annabelle Chatsis, 2015. Respecting dialectal variations in a Blackfoot language class. In J. Reyhner, J. Martin, L. Lockard, & W. S. Gilbert (Eds.), Honoring our elders: Culturally appropriate approaches for teaching indigenous students (pp. 109–116). Northern Arizona University. Montler, Timothy, 1999. Language and dialect variation in Straits Salishan. Anthropological Linguistics, 41(4), 462–502. Nagy, Naomi (2020). HLVC transcriptions and recordings. Scholars Portal Dataverse, V1. Nevalainen, T. (2015). What are historical sociolinguistics?. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 1(2), 243–269. Palakurthy, Kayla, 2019. Prosody in Diné Bizaad narratives: A quantitative investigation of acoustic correlates. International Journal of American Linguistics, 85(4), 497–531. Palakurthy, Kayla, 2020. The role of similarity in sound change: Variation and change in Diné affricates. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 25(2). Palakurthy, Kayla, 2022. Phonetic transfer in Diné Bizaad (Navajo). Linguistics Vanguard, 8(5), 691–701. Palakurthy, Kayla. (2023). Community-based Sociolinguistic Variation in North American languages. In C. Jany, M. Mithun, & K. Rice (Eds.), The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America: A Comprehensive Guide, Vol 1. Mouton de Gruyter. Pérez, Báez, Gabriela, Vogel R., & Patolo, U. (2019). Global survey of revitalization efforts: A mixed methods approach to understanding language revitalization practices. Language Documentation and Conservation, 13, 446. Polinsky, M. (2018). Who are these speakers, where do they come from, and how did they get to be the way they are? In Heritage languages and their speakers (pp. 1–37). Cambridge University Press. Rice, K. (2020, April 17). Indigenous sign languages in Canada. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada. Retrieved April 4, 2023, from www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ indigenous-sign-languages-in-canada Rice, K., & Saxon, L. (2002). Issues of standardization and community in Aboriginal language lexicography. In W. Frawley, K. Hill, & P. Munro (Eds.), Making dictionaries: Preserving indigenous languages of the Americas (pp. 125–154). University of California Press. Rosen, N., Stewart, J., & Sammons, O. N. (2020). How mixed is mixed language phonology? An acoustic analysis of the Michif vowel system. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(4), 2989–2999. Roy, L. (1998). Four directions: An indigenous educational model. Wicazo Sa Review, 13(2), 59–69. Singh, M., & Major, J, 2017. Conducting Indigenous research in Western knowledge spaces: Aligning theory and methodology. Australian Educational Researcher, 44(1), 5–19. Smith, L. (1999 & 2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books. Soukup, B. (2017). Historical sociolinguistic philology – a New Hybrid discipline, its interests, and its scope. Open Linguistics, 3(1), 673–678. Spence, J. (2016). Lexical innovation and variation in Hupa (Athabaskan). International Journal of American Linguistics, 82(1), 72–93. Stanford, J. N., & Preston, D. R. (2009). Variation in indigenous minority languages. John Benjamins. Sturtevant, William, 1998. Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 4: History of Indian-White relations. Smithsonian Institution. Taylor-Adams (2022). L2 Motivation in language revitalization contexts [Doctoral Dissertation, University of Oregon]. Tonh, Green, J., & Maracle, O. B. (2018). The root-word method for building proficient second-language speakers of polysynthetic languages. In L. Hinton, L. Huss, & G. Roche (Eds.), Routledge handbook of language revitalization (pp. 146–155). Taylor and Francis. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, AVS, Jane S. Charlie (2010). Statement to the truth and reconciliation commission of Canada, Deline, Northwest Territories, 2 March 2010, Statement Number: 07-NWT-02MR1–002.
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Indigenous languages of North America Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015. Canada’s residential schools: The final report of the truth and reconciliation commission of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press. UNESCO. (2003). Language vitality and endangerment. Document submitted to the international expert meeting on UNESCO programme safeguarding of endangered languages. https://ich.unesco.org/doc/ src/00120-EN.pdf Valentine, R. (1995). Ojibwe dialect relations: lexical maps. https://resources.atlas-ling.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2015/02/valentine-OjibweDialectSurveyLexical.pdf Virtue, H., Gessner, S., & Daniels, D. (Xway’Waat) (2012). B.C.’s master-apprentice language program handbook. First Peoples’ Cultural Council. Wilson, S. (2001). What is an indigenous research methodology? Canadian Journal of Native Education, 25(2), 175–179. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony. In Indigenous research methods. Fernwood. Windchief, S., Polacek, C., Munson, M., Ulrich, M., & Cummins, J. D. (2017). In reciprocity: Responses to critiques of Indigenous methodologies. Qualitative Inquiry, 24, 532–542. Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. Younker, J. T. (2003). Coquille/Kō’Kwel, a Southern oregon coast Indian tribe: Revisiting history, ingenuity, and identity. University of Oregon. Yu, Alan, 2008. The phonetics of quantity alternation in Washo. Journal of Phonetics, 36(3), 508–520. Zahir, ʔəswəli Z. (2018). Language nesting in the home. In L. Hinton, L. Huss, & G. Roche (Eds.), Routledge handbook of language revitalization (pp. 156–165). Taylor and Francis.
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4 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN MEXICO Defining new agendas José Antonio Flores Farfán
Introduction Sociolinguistics in Mexico is a relatively recent development. It dates to the 1970s and 1980s, when the first publications with the sociolinguistic label started to appear (Perissinotto, 1975; Hamel et al., 1982; Lastra, 1992). At least three research traditions have been developed that can be considered as sociolinguistic practice. First, anthropological linguistics, which predates the other two and goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century and has had continuity ever since the founders of the discipline launched their work, considering Mexico an open laboratory for the development of its research agenda (Boas, 1963). Second, variationist sociolinguistics, as represented today by work on urban sociolinguistics, specifically of Mexico City Spanish (see e.g., Butragueño, 2000). The latter is the most recent addition to this myriad of research. Finally, there is the sociolinguistics of conflict between the stunning number of indigenous languages of the country and Spanish. What the first two traditions have in common is their focus on one single language, indigenous languages, and Spanish, respectively. The third tradition at least appeals to bilingualism, even when ironically not always studying the multiple linguistic expressions of bilingualism as a social practice, a field which given its importance includes a handful of investigations dealing with conflictive bilingualism and the sociolinguistics of contact, language shift and to a much lesser extent the recent emergent field of language revitalization. In this chapter, I will only provide a brief sketch of some of such sociolinguistic studies and their caveats, pinpointing the enormous wealth of sociolinguistic topics waiting to be taken into consideration. For instance, there are few, if any, investigations on the immigrated languages of Indo-European or other origins (for exceptions; Lastra, 1992, 2005; Lipski, 2007), the Rom and the state of the Romani language in Mexico, or the sociolinguistics of the only Creole language in Mexico, the Afro Seminole Creole (cf. Hancock, 1980), a language reaching the brink of extinction, which is totally terra ignota, especially from a sociolinguistic point of view. Due to the complexity and wealth of topics encompassed by such a sociolinguistic agenda in Mexico, I will concentrate on what I consider a most urgent issue, i.e., the emergent field of indigenous language revitalization. But before going more in depth in such topic, let us look at other outstanding sociolinguistics topics. DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-6 54
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The sociolinguistics of Spanish Even when recently indigenous languages have been declared co-official, Spanish is the only real official, standard language of a total population of over 120 million people in Mexico. Linguistic investigations of Spanish supersede what has been carried out with Mexican indigenous languages in different respects; for instance, regarding the study of sociolinguistic variability, even when this is also a very recent attempt. In the case of indigenous languages, such study is almost nonexistent. Following a Labovian paradigm, research in and around Spanish has concentrated on internal linguistic variability, with the advantage of going beyond impressionistic descriptions of Mexican Spanish, presenting different steps forward with respect to previous philological traditions, such as vindicating the realistic Labovian approach to data and its emphasis on the social use of language and its heterogeneity (see Butragueño, 2000). Perhaps the most interesting premise that the sociolinguistics of Spanish advances is its appeal to a conflict model which alludes to the power differentials which guide any sociolinguistic process, looking to apply theoretical formulations such as Milroy and Milroy (1995) to the Mexican reality (see Butragueño, 2000). In short, variationist sociolinguistics in Mexico is still a research program, with a few interesting preliminary case studies, ranging from the investigation of “linguistic leaders,” (Butragueño, 2006) to courtesy strategies in Mexican Spanish (Butragueño, 2000), and recently revisiting the lexicon impact of Nahuatl on Mexican Spanish configuration. On the other hand, almost no sociolinguistic investigations have been developed on the Spanish that indigenous people speak (for an attempt, see Flores Farfán, 1999), not to speak of immigrants’ Spanish. What has been investigated is the influence of indigenous languages on monolingual Spanish, yet almost exclusively limited to philological approaches1 on the lexicon and its impact on the phonetics of Mexican or Yucatec Spanish. In such interesting cases as the latter, in which the influence of Yucatec Maya is notable, yet treated as marginal phenomena, subsidiary to internal “systemic” constraints (Lope Blanch, 1987), even when this and other Mexican Spanish varieties such as Oaxaca Spanish (see Garza Cuarón, 1987), at least partially resemble what is termed a semi-Creole (Lipski, 2007).
The sociolinguistics of Mexican indigenous languages Parallel to its ethnic complexity, Mexico is among the most diverse countries of the world linguistically speaking. It occupies the first place in linguistic diversity in the Americas in terms of number of speakers as well as in variety of languages. Of over 120 million people, the indigenous population rounds up to 10 percent of the total population: roughly 10 million people speak an indigenous language. The country’s sociolinguistic complexity is evidenced by the non-total agreement between scholars regarding the number of its languages or even linguistic families. Quantitative figures are the subject of intense political manipulation and ideologies, thus different research traditions tend to either overestimate or underestimate the number of Mexican languages. Compare the top figure of almost 300 languages suggested by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) (www.sil.org) with the official figure provided by the Mexican state, which is 68 languages. According to the official version, Mexico has representatives of eleven linguistic families, including Uto-Aztec, Mayan, Otomanguean, Totonac-Tepehua, and Mixe Zoque, plus three linguistic isolates: Huave, Purepecha, and Seri. In contrast to situations with highly endangered languages such as the United States, in Mexico, monolingualism exists in specific enclaves of indigenous languages, a meaningful2 index of historical entrenchment of several of these communities and their vibrant existence. Yet, this does not 55
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mean they are not endangered. Since these languages have been less investigated from a sociolinguistic point of view, I will devote the rest of this chapter to reviewing the sociolinguistics of Mexican indigenous languages. A handful of indigenous languages have enjoyed sociolinguistic investigations, notably Nahuatl (e.g. Hill & Hill, 1986), Maya Yucatec (e.g. Pfeiler, 1998), Otomi (e.g. Zimmermann, 1986), Mazahua (e.g. Pellicer, 2005), Tzotzil (e.g. Haviland, 1988), Zapotec (e.g. Saynes, 2000), and Yaqui (e.g. Moctezuma-Zamarrón, 1998). One-sided monolingual perspectives on which most of these investigations have developed their practice are difficult to overcome for several reasons. For example, in my initial work on verbal interaction in Hñahñu (Otomi) markets (Flores Farfán, 2004a), the investigation was carried out in Spanish, since I am not a Hñahñu speaker. However, one of the main results was that researching in the indigenous language would open another perspective that would allow a much more comprehensive picture of the complex sociolinguistic reality of this and other indigenous groups, characterized as a situation of conflictive diglossic bilingualism, i.e., leading to language shift. Even when such a trend does exist, evidenced in that some of these communities already have Spanish as their mother tongue, revisiting Hñahñu shows that there are ways of resisting the intromission of Spanish. For instance, Hñahñu was found to be linked to important emotional and even instrumental functions, such as being a secret language to conceal information leading to decision-making in the communal assemblies in which Hñahñus negotiate specific demands with the Mexican state (see Franco Pellotier, 1997). In the subsequent phases of my work, learning the indigenous languages became a must, starting with varieties of Nahuatl, supposedly the single best-known indigenous language, or rather, languages, of the country. This allowed me to start understanding ways of resisting and overcoming the ever-present possibility of language shift. To understand such less investigated processes, that is, the entrenchment and resistance of several indigenous communities and their languages, or diglossic reversals, a historical perspective turns out to be enlightening.
Historical sociolinguistics of Mexican indigenous languages Even when there is extensive documentation spanning the whole colonial period and important archeological and ethnohistorical information, it is still hard to reconstruct the sociolinguistic history of Mexican indigenous languages. Several languages enjoy such extensive documentation, outstandingly Nahuatl, a language which became the most widely used lingua franca in pre-Hispanic times. Other linguae francae probably included Yucatec Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec and Purepecha. All these languages coincided with the so-called languages of civilization in Mesoamerica.3 Limited Mesoamerican prehistoric evidence of loanwords in several Mesoamerican languages points to the loose political organization of Classical times (c. AD 330, cf. Suárez, 1983, p. 157). Most loanwords reflect existing power differentials of the time. For instance, the widespread use of cacao as common currency, the general use of the base 20 numeral system, or toponyms such as Nahuatl Atitlan show Aztec domination in what today is Guatemala in Quichean (Mayan) languages. Yet contacts were mostly limited to the ruling classes. The grammars and other materials produced by missionaries reflect this fact, since it was with the male elites that Spaniards mostly interacted (see Flores Farfán, 2007). Aztecs dominated vast parts of Mesoamerica some 300 years before the Spanish invasion. While paying tribute and under military control, a relative independence was present in all separate cultural and linguistic entities of the so-called Aztec empire. This fact prefigures today’s high linguistic diversification in most Mexican languages, except for some of those which were not subjugated by the Aztecs. Even when Nahuatl had the lingua franca status, which the Spaniards chose 56
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for evangelization and administration of the new colonies up until the eighteenth century – a fact which ironically contributed to Nahuatl maintenance – this is an excellent example of the existence of multilingualism in highly stratified societies in general and in the expression of the Aztec state. The history of Nahuatl illustrates the sociolinguistic situation of Mexican indigenous languages in different periods, including the pre-Hispanic one, when there were a series of double-nested diglossias (Fasold, 1990), or better polyglossia, in which Nahuatl occupied the high pole of the diglossic spectrum, both internally (with respect to other Nahuatl varieties or languages) as well as externally (with respect to other languages). Linguistic evidence of this complex pre-Hispanic organization, which to a certain extent continued in colonial times, is evidenced in the existence of native terms which refer to this diglossic differentiation: Macehuallatoli “speech of the common people,” as opposed to Pillatolli in “Classical” Nahuatl, “the speech of the elite,” the high varieties in which most early sources of the sixteenth century were written, now extinct (see Flores Farfán, 2004b). Moreover, to understand the conflictive multilingual pre-Hispanic ethos, consider that Nahuatl means “something pristine, pleasant, intelligible to the ear” (Karttunen, 1983), something that the Aztecs spread throughout the Mesoamerican world as part of their sociolinguistic policy. This included devising derogatory names for speakers of other languages, including Nahua varieties such as Cohuixca, or Pipil “lizard” and “infant speech,” when referring to speakers in the Balsas (Guerrero) Nahuatl and those of today’s Salvador, respectively. Or Popoluca “unintelligible tongue,” Chontal “foreigner,” Otomitl “barbarian,” etc. (Heath, 1972), names that still prevail today. Despite the extensive intrusion of Spaniards during the first half-century of the colony, Nahuatl did not really undergo much change in its structure, a fact interpreted as an effect of limited social contact. New words (neologisms), descriptive explanations (circumlocutions), or adapting old words to new meanings (semantic extensions) prevailed in this phase. Few if any nouns were borrowed, although specific key domains of Nahuatl culture such as religious terminology were forcibly rooted out. In the second stage, which goes up to the first half of the seventeenth century, resistance to borrowing decreased, yet loanwords were limited to nouns, and bilingualism started to expand. The third stage is characterized by opening the Nahuatl language to all types of borrowings, including verbs and almost any type of Spanish material (see Lockhart, 1992; Flores Farfán, 1999), together with the generalization of one-sided bilingualism. This tendency has prevailed and been taken to a high level in modern times, in which massive borrowing is possible, seeing the birth of new types of Nahuatl in processes reminiscent of inverse pidgin formation, yet emerging in relation to Nahuatl shift (Flores Farfán, 2008). In modern Nahuatl, shift has occurred in several Nahua communities, as the Balsas region, represented by extremely Hispanicized communities reaching the brink of extinction, such as the contemporary successors of Milpa Alta speakers in today’s Mexico City, the last location where Nahuatl is still spoken in the Valley of Mexico, or Chilacachapa Nahuatl (Flores Farfán, 2008). However, Nahuatl is well and alive in several villages, although endangered. All this leads to a fifth or even sixth stage, characterized by movements to resist language shift, as in the Balsas region. Linked to internal commerce and ritual ties at the community level, diglossic reversals can and indeed do exist not only in Nahuatl communities, but also in several other languages Moreover, even if stage theories suggest a systematic account of the historical order in which Spanish has impacted Mesoamerican languages, and eventually replaced them, the most interesting sociolinguistic phenomena have not yet been deciphered by such large-scale macrocharacterizations (Flores Farfán, 2001). Chronologies are not linear, static or homogeneous phenomena (cf. Lockhart, 1992). Local differences are present in isolated communities in which a single interpretation cannot be mechanically applied. For instance, a wide spectrum of speakers exists, including quasi and pseudo-speakers, depending on variables such as age, gender, degree of Hispanicization 57
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and even political affiliation (Flores Farfán, 1999). Therefore, within a single region and even within communities extreme shift together with monolingualism in the indigenous tongue coexist, challenging any attempt at linear characterizations. In general, what is true for Nahuatl is valid, mutatis mutandis, for several indigenous languages which have experienced extreme diversification processes, most notably the Otomanguean family. Today Nahuatl is supposedly the language with more speakers in Mexico (circa 1.5 million) but is isolated in several different areas with no contact whatsoever, Spanish becoming the lingua franca. Yet, the idea of Nahuatl as a single language is likely to have originated in postcolonial monolingual ideologies, still prevalent in academia and among the public. Despite one-language ideologies, Nahuatl is a set of not totally intelligible varieties (e.g., speakers give it different names, contingent on the region in question, Mexicano being the most common). This fact influences Mexican indigenous demolinguistics, situating Maya Yucatec in the first place, numerically speaking. Interestingly, Maya Yucatec is the opposite case as compared to Nahuatl or Otomanguean languages (e.g., Mixtec or Zapotec). Yucatec Maya (and a few others such as Purepecha) is a relatively uniform language, a fact reinforcing awareness and consciousness of linguistic and cultural intelligibility and internal solidarity ties. This situation is to a certain extent pre-figured by the pre-Hispanic complexity of these languages and their sociolinguistic colonial and modern history, which link linguistic diversification to a subordinated position, while languages such as Yucatec or Purepecha were spoken in independent states, at least in certain periods of history, expressed by high levels of linguistic uniformity. Today the field of (Mexican) sociolinguistics has dramatically reconfigured itself, especially associated with the field of language endangerment, which has become one of the most important foci of linguistic research – both at the local and global levels. This calls for new ways of approaching the issue of multilingualism, especially in the case of minoritized languages, closing divides between sociolinguistic research and language revitalization.
Language revitalization in Mexico: present and new directions The question of developing specific intervention research proposals in the field of language revitalization has become central worldwide. We can think of UNESCO’S recent declaration of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022–2032, in which a whole new rhetoric, moving from a passive, fatalistic, necrophiliac discourse, to a proactive, committed approach has appeared regarding endangered languages. These are most of all projects inspired by models such as research in action or action research, committed linguistics or engaged anthropology, which go hand in hand with indigenous peoples’ own quests for a series of emancipations. Going beyond received documentation approaches, an active documentation or documentation with revitalization in mind constitutes a new paradigm which pursues to highlight, accompany, and even trigger the agency of communities themselves in the vindication of their languages and cultures. In Mexico, there are few revitalization projects or even studies on revitalization processes (see e.g., Saynes, 2000). I will briefly review some of the most outstanding revitalization projects, before closing with our own efforts in the field, starting with the most recent one, Olko and Sullivan’s project on Nahuatl revitalization (e.g., 2016). This project has been active for the last decade. It looks to empower native Nahuatl speakers through a methodology that brings together speakers of different dialectal varieties, who are widespread in a diversity of regions normally not in direct contact. Nahuatl, one of the most populous languages of the whole country, ranging from 1.5 to 2 million people, depending on the source one relies on, presents an enormous wealth of historical documentation spanning the whole colonial period and beyond. Setting up workshops, Olko and 58
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Sullivan facilitate interdialectal encounters exclusively in Nahuatl, bringing together speakers of such different Nahua regions, studying and analyzing old Nahuatl documentation. This approach allows the development of a polydialectal competence, one of its principal assets, amplifying Nahuas’ linguistic repertories, together with asserting a sense of pride, which such an historical legacy invites. The project also produces written contemporary materials, in genres such as poetry or “traditional” stories, using the standard orthography developed by Anglo-Saxon academics – an issue that might be conceived as problematic in the face of other emergent orthographies pursued by Nahuatl speakers, unfortunately at times favoring factionalisms, yet looking to facilitate a Nahuatl corpus developed by indigenous authors themselves, materialized in a series called Totlahtol, “our language.” Another very interesting revitalization project, which has been active for over two decades now, also based on bottom-up workshops, in this case in different regions and languages is reported in Leonard, Macgave-Gragnic and Aviles (2013). With a partial or no immersion approach in the endangered languages, such as Mazatec and Nahuatl in Mexico, and even in other Latin America languages (e.g., Nasayuwe in Colombia), in contrast to Olko and Sullivan, Leonard et al. do not utilize a standard script in their efforts. Rather, they look to play around with a pool of orthographic possibilities, without “freezing” the minoritized languages, avoiding imposing a purist or censorship view on the written script of the languages, celebrating variability, which often times is at the root of multiple sociolinguistic identities. Stemming from a ground-based theory, collecting data with a cause, Leonard et al.’s efforts are not limited to the “in the sake of science,” passive documentation ideology, which prevails in hegemonic documentation approaches. On the contrary, this initiative develops a multiple documentation approach, opening space to creating different multimedia documents, looking to incorporate communities’ local agendas and epistemologies, therefore favoring their visibility and educational empowerment, even reactivating dormant speakers’ competences, promoting sociolinguistic resilience, a very important target in revitalization efforts in which we have also looked to (re)create neo-speakers. In such a revitalization vein, we have developed a pilot program in which revitalization efforts are focused upon members of the community, favoring indigenous (co)authorships, alongside the production and dissemination of revitalization corpora in several indigenous languages which in turn are disseminated at the community level. Looking to favor a cultural and linguistic consumption from the bottom up, the main approach of our revitalization endeavor is going beyond the colonial heritage of received descriptive and even documentary linguistics, developing a committed Mexican sociolinguistics, which would as one of its main tenets develop an approach along the lines of militant or activist sociolinguistics, bridging the gap between language documentation, sociolinguistics and revitalization (see the idea of “active documentation” in Flores Farfán & Ramallo, 2010). A brief description of such an experience, which looks to close divides between academia and indigenous peoples agendas, follows.
The linguistic and cultural revitalization, maintenance and development project The Linguistic and Cultural Revitalization, Maintenance and Development Project is a pilot program developed in Mexico for roughly three decades now. As the title suggests, it is oriented to the defense of endangered languages and cultures, a key issue of which is the active participation of speakers, recovering their own agendas. The title also suggests a continuum of 59
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endangerment-vitality situations, in which the utopia is to move from (re)vitalization to the development and even cultivation of threatened languages, stabilizing them, of course depending on the specifics of each first language, of which Mexico has officially 68 different ones. In the quest to balance power between the researcher and the researched, an intercultural approach is taken in which revitalizing is not an individualistic endeavor, but rather a collective construction, in which the corpus planning and production phases facilitate co-authorships as a key feature of the empowerment process. Each participant plays a key role at least at some step of the whole process, contributing specific complementary skills, such as speaker, artist, researcher or activist or a combination of them all. These teams look to recreate indigenous epistemologies and methodologies in multimodal, high-quality formats (e.g., 3D animation).4 Community materials in turn are utilized to organize encounters on the ground, favoring emergent dynamics in workshops with children and the youth, who are summoned to participate in the screening of a movie. For this purpose, we recast local genres with a high educational potential, verbal art such as riddles and tongue twisters, tales, etc. Stemming from such epistemologies of Nahuas, Mayas, Tu’un Savi (Mixtec), etc. For instance, riddles or tongue twisters are an excellent example of language socialization nests of indigenous cultures, beyond conceiving them from a Euro centric approach, e.g., limited to the written word, conceiving them as exclusively or limited to “children’s games.” Consider as an example that in the Balsas Nahuas communities a Tentetl, “jewel lips,” is considered the top possible speaker, referring to someone that is totally fluent in such Nahuatl genres, demonstrating the highest possible cultural and communicative competence. Another example of the recovering of indigenous methodologies and epistemologies is the opossum Tlakwaatsiin, (Tlacuache in Spanish), “greedy guts,” the Mesoamerican trickster par excellence. Representing the Mesoamerican Prometheus, Tlakwaatsiin plays around with the deepest content of indigenous cultures, such as those depicted in the ancient Codexes, bridging old and modern traditions, bringing together ancestral languages and their aesthetics in contemporary formats.5 The corpus production includes several languages in multimedia formats, animation, audio, documentary, video, books, and music, either in multilingual or monolingual versions, depending on the audience aimed at. In all of which the indigenous language occupies the most prominent place, subordinating the colonial to the endangered language, providing status, and reversing extremely negative stereotypes towards the threatened tongue, even reaching the point in which we are producing totally monolingual materials in the minoritized language.6 The model is thought of as a playful, joyful one, openly attempting to actively capture interlocutors, especially children, utilizing attractive, trendy formats. We have pursued such goals via informal workshops developing an exercise towards a different ecology of preferred language choices, implying a new ecology in terms of the research relationship alluded to in terms of a spontaneous, emergent, not forced participation, labeled an indirect method of language revitalization, entailing that the structure of participation is the prerogative of the audience, which is conceived as an active agent in the revitalization process. This is favored by triggering participation via video shows which are conducted in the indigenous tongue to which members of the whole community, especially children, are invited to attend on special occasions, such as community festivities. In such events normally children attend with a sibling or even their parents or grandparents, an act that invites to reestablish the intergenerational transmission of the language, as it is a well known key issue in reversing language shift. Based on the production of such culturally sensitive materials and the use of multimodal incentives, not only with indigenous children but also with a wider audience, the indirect methodology of language revitalization is developed in informal settings, looking not to ghettoize participation, 60
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but rather constructing an intercultural approach in which, as stated, participation of children is a spontaneous prerogative of the audience. In sum, our approach is detached from school rituals, and not limited to a single medium such as the written code, overcoming logocentrism. This allows the emergence of children’s voices without forcing participation. In this way children are motivated to share their own knowledge and even produce more materials collaboratively, replying to the riddles or tongue twisters or producing new ones, and at times bringing in new resources to the revitalization dynamics. In turn, their participation is encouraged through the distribution of books, augmented reality or the videos themselves, disseminating materials that will reach and hopefully be used in local households, a key sphere for the reproduction and revitalization of endangered languages and cultures (Flores Farfán, 2001, 2021). The intercultural approach to revitalization alluded to implies distinguishing different moments and dynamics regarding different types of audiences with different needs and situations. Our method, which could also be called an audiovisual method of revitalization in as much as it heavily relies on the production and dissemination of multimodal materials, looks to identify different needs and develop auto diagnosis on the run of types of endangerments and vitality, acting accordingly. For instance, it is of course not the same to work with a relatively strong community as the Yucatec Maya, whose language, albeit endangered, enjoys a series of positive issues, in contrast to languages that have a few speakers left, such as the Yuma in the other Mexican Peninsula of Baja California, some of which are reaching the tip of extinction, becoming dormant languages. Yucatec Maya enjoys an Academy of the Maya Language, a critical mass of Maya activists and intellectuals, not to speak of the high uniformity of the language itself, which precludes communication problems among the three states that make up the Yucatán Peninsula, together with some top-down institutional support. In this context, alongside a core team of a couple of Maya linguists, a Maya illustrator and activist, and several other local actors, we have accompanied the production and dissemination of a series of materials in the Yucatán Peninsula. Reaching more than a thousand workshops, these include distributing over 100,000 books of Maya riddles, tongue twisters and tales (five titles, including coloring books, which also include audio), representing more than 10% of the whole Maya population, estimated at almost one million speakers.7 We have recently facilitated rapping tongue twisters and the advice of the elders for good living, with the very successful Yucatec rappers of ADN Maya, producing a CD that circulates in the Peninsula and beyond. This material allows a series of key steps forward in (re)vitalizing the Maya language and culture. While the CD as all other materials is donated to the rappers for free, they can either donate it themselves or instrumentally benefit from selling it in different contexts, adding economic value to their efforts, a crucial fact in transforming the at times deeply rooted negative perception that endangered languages are linked to poverty. Moreover, it brings to a contemporary format, very popular among the children and the youth, the old genre of the advice of the elders for the proper Maya living, bridging different generations and providing continuity to ancestral Maya belief systems. At the same time, an added plus of the rapper’s movement is the fact that their music is becoming part of the global rapping scene, producing a positive effect on mainstream society, reaching the point in which at least some Spanish monolingual speakers conceive rapping in Maya as trendy and cool.8 All this brings us a to a final important consideration regarding language (re)vitalization, which is seldomly considered in these types of projects; namely, working towards mainstream society. In this respect, our project has developed strategies looking to gain respect and valorization of indigenous languages and cultures via a series of productions and concepts, looking to overcome ghettoization of indigenous languages, a trend prevalent at least from the state’s bottom down perspective, concealing structural racism, patronizing indigenous communities. Our approach looks 61
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to raise awareness among the Spanish speaking public by a series of communicative actions and productions, thought of as having a double positive effect, favoring a dialogue between ancestral communities and mainstream society. For instance, so called Mexican Spanish has historically nurtured itself from Nahuatl, providing it with a special identity: Nahuatl linguistic profile is all over the Mexican variety, mostly referred to the Mexican plateau, on the streets, roads, etc., not only in the lexicon, although this is its most visible side. In this respect, we have produced the Opossum’s somersaults (las Machincuepas del Tlacuache), and the Opossum’s Dreams (Los Sueños del Tlacuache), both materials in animation, depicting Mexican popular culture and the presence of the indigenous tongue and culture in Mexico City’s metro and beyond.9 In this way, children and the average lay man are joyfully approximated to the first people’s legacy, identifying him-herself in the mirror of Mexican sociolinguistic diversity.
Final remarks In Mexico even though sociolinguistics dates to the 1970s, it is still a marginal discipline. This is due to a series of reasons, outstandingly the predominant ideology of mainstream linguists, who despise the sociolinguistics agenda, denigrating it as “not linguistics,” a view which its gate keepers look to pass on to the new generations. Notwithstanding, there are some important developments in the field, such as those depicted in the present contribution that hopefully will keep on steadily growing. More importantly, in contexts such as the Mexican, sociolinguistics should go beyond an exclusive academic endeavor, looking to bridge gaps between e.g., sociolinguistics, documentation and revitalization of indigenous people’s agendas (Flores Farfán & Ramallo, 2010).
Notes 1 Mexican Spanish refers to the variety spoken in Mexico City, representing the prestige variety utilized in the media, while Yucatec Spanish, spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula, is often mocked by speakers of Mexican Spanish. 2 However, monolingualism can also be the expression of interethnic exploitation, as suggested for Huastec Nahuatl, in which Mestizos (the Spanish-speaking dominant group) prevent indigenous people from learning Spanish in order to perpetuate their subordination (Stiles, 1982). 3 Mesoamerica is conceived as a common cultural and linguistic area which geographically spanned from today’s Central Mexico down to El Salvador and Honduras, with such shared traits as monumental architecture and highly sophisticated systems of writing, together with elaborated social stratifications expressed in, for instance, honorific speech and shared linguistic abilities, such as the use of a lingua franca and the existence of multilingual individuals. Common linguistic traits traditionally include shared vocabulary for specific cultural and material objects, which has led scholars to speak of Mesoamerica as a linguistic area or Sprachbund (see Campbell et al., 1986). Another trait that came into open conflict with colonizers’ ideologies was the existence of polytheistic societies. 4 Cf. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd3LRnOrG9Q&list=PL122A5EE57B9E1AA6 5 See, for example https://tlacuatzin.org 6 Cf. www.academia.edu/28686161/Tsintsiinkirianteenpitskontsiin_Trabalenguas_nahuas 7 Cf. www.academia.edu/42657855/Adivinanzas_mayas_yucatecas 8 Cf. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry9W_RawYYU 9 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drzu0eT8wUk https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1c08zHAQN7ZY xc4ENapYv7wkPlJkJ1aDn?usp=sharing
References Boas, F. (1963). Introduction to handbook of American Indian languages. Georgetown University Press. Butragueño, P. M (Ed.). (2000). Estructuras en contexto. Estudios de variación lingüística. El Colegio de México.
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Sociolinguistics in Mexico Butragueño, P. M. (2006). Líderes lingüísticos en la Ciudad de México. In P. M. Butragueño (Ed.), Líderes lingüísticos: Estudios de variación y cambio (pp. 185–208). El Colegio de México. Campbell, L., Kaufman, T., & Smith Stark, T. C. (1986). Mesoamerica as a linguistic area. Language. Journal of the Linguistics Society of America, 62, 530–570. Fasold, R. (1990). The sociolinguistics of society. Basil Blackwell. Flores Farfán, J. A. (1999). Cuatreros Somos y Toindioma Hablamos. Contactos y Conflictos entre el Náhuatl y el Español en el Sur de México. CIESAS. Flores Farfán, J. A. (2001). Culture and language revitalization, maintenance and development in Mexico. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 152, 185–197. Flores Farfán, J. A. (2004a). ‘Al fin que ya los cueros no van a correr’: Pragmatics of power in Hñahñu (Otomi) markets. Language in Society, 32(5), 629–658. Flores Farfán, J. A. (2004b). Classical Nahuatl: Outlining its sociolinguistic complexity. In T. Stolz (Ed.), Alte sprachen, diversitas linguarum (Vol. 8, pp. 167–178). Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer. Flores Farfán, J. A. (2007). La variación lingüística en las artes mexicanas (con especial énfasis en el náhuatl). In Z. Otto, G. James, & E. Riduejo (Eds.), Missionary linguistics III: Morphology and syntax. Selected Papers from the Third and Fourth International Conferences on Missionary Linguistics (pp. 59–74). John Benjamins. Flores Farfán, J. A. (2008). The Hispanisation of modern Nahuatl varieties. In: Stoltz et al. www.academia. edu/31895935/The_hispanicization_pdf Flores Farfán, J. A. (2021). The revitalization, maintenance and linguistic development project. In J. Olko & J. Sallabank (Eds.), Revitalizing endangered languages (pp. 293–296). Cambridge University Press. Flores Farfán, J. A., & Ramallo, F. (2010). New perspectives on endangered languages. John Benjamins. www.academia.edu/372334/New_Perspectives_on_Endangered_Languages Franco Pellotier, V. M. (1997). Revalorización lingüística en sociedades indígenas: uso del video en comunidades ñahñu [M.A. thesis, ENAH, México]. Garza Cuarón, B. (1987). El español hablado en la Ciudad de Oaxaca, México: Caracterización fonética y léxica. El Colegio de México. Hamel, R. E., Lastra de Suarez, Y., & Muñoz, H. (Eds.). (1982). Sociolingüística latinoamericana. Congreso Mundial de Sociología, México. UNAM. Hancock, I. F. (1980). The Texas seminoles and their language (Papers – African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center, Series 2; No. 1). University of Texas at Austin. Haviland, J. B. (1988). Minimal maxims: Cooperation and natural conversation in Zinacantan. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 4, 79–114. Heath, S. B. (1972). La Política del Lenguaje en México. De la Colonia a la Nación. INI, SEP. Hill, J. H., & Hill, K. C. (1986). Speaking Mexicano: Dynamics of a syncretic language in Central Mexico. The University of Arizona Press. Karttunen, F. (1983). An analytical dictionary of Nahuatl. University of Texas at Austin. Lastra, Y. (1992). Sociolingüística para hispanoamericanos. Una introducción. El Colegio de México. Lastra, Y. (2005). Mexico and Central America. In U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. Mattheier, & P. Trudgill (Eds.), Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik: An international handbook of the science of language and society/Ein Internationales Handbuch zur Wissenschaft von Sprache und Gesellschaft (2nd ed., Vol. 3, pp. 2073– 2081). Mouton de Gruyter. Leonard, L., Macgabe Gragnic, J., & Aviles, K. (2013). Multilingual policies put into practice: Co-participative educational workshops in Mexico. Current Issues in Language Planning, 3–04, 419–443. Lipski, J. M. (2007). El español de América en contacto con otras lenguas. In M. Lacorte (Ed.), Lingüística aplicada del español. Online. www.personal.psu.edu/jml34/contacts.pdf Lockhart, J. (1992). The Nahuas: A social and cultural history of the Indians of Central Mexico, sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Stanford University Press. Lope Blanch, J. M. (1987). Estudios sobre el español de Yucatán. UNAM. Milroy, J., & Milroy, L. (1995). Authority in language: Investigating language prescription and standardization. Routledge. Moctezuma-Zamarrón, J. L. (1998). Yaqui-Mayo language shift [Doctoral thesis, The University of Arizona]. Olko, J., & Sullivan, J. (2016). Bridging divides. A proposal for integrating the teaching, research and revitalization of Nahuatl. In V. Ferreira & P. Bouda (Eds.), Language documentation and conservation 39 (pp. 159–184). University of Hawai’i Press. Pellicer, S. D. (2005). Stages of bilingualism: Local conversational practices among Mazahuas. In Margarita Hidalgo (Ed.), Mexican Indigenous languages at the dawn of the 21st century. Mouton de Gruyter.
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José Antonio Flores Farfán Perissinotto, G. A. (1975). Fonología del español hablado en la Ciudad de México: Ensayo de un método sociolingüístico (Raúl Ávila, Trans.). El Colegio de México. Pfeiler, B. (1998). El xe’ek y la hach maya: Cambio y futuro del maya ante la modernidad cultural en Yucatán. In A. Koechert & T. Stolz (Eds.), Convergencia e individualidad. Las lenguas Mayas entre hispanización e indigenismo (pp. 125–140). Verlag für Ethnologie. Saynes, V. F. (2000). Zapotec language shift and reversal in Juchitan, Mexico [Doctoral thesis, University of Arizona]. Stiles, N. (1982). Nahuatl in the Huasteca Hidalguense: A case study in the sociology of language [Doctoral thesis, University of Saint Andrews]. Suárez, J. A. (1983). The Mesoamerican Indian languages. Cambridge University Press. Zimmermann, K. (1986). El español de los otomíes del valle del Mezquital (México). Un dialecto étnico. In Actas del II Congreso Internacional sobre el español de América (pp. 234–240). Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
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5 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN CENTRAL AMERICA Brandon Baird
Introduction Central America is the isthmus that connects North America to South America and consists of seven countries: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. Guatemala and Belize form the northern border with Mexico, Panama borders Colombia on the south, and El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica make up the interior of the region that separates the Pacific Ocean on the west and the Atlantic Ocean, specifically, the Caribbean Sea, on the east. Similar to other regions of Latin American, Central America is home to a diverse population of native peoples and various indigenous languages that have been in unstable diglossias with Spanish and, to a lesser degree, English, since the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century. Spanish is the most widely spoken language in every country and, with the exception of Belize (formerly British Honduras), it is also the national language in every Central American country. The ten most common languages or language families in Central America are presented in Table 5.1. Several of these languages/language families are also spoken in Southern Mexico (Mayan languages) or Colombia (Kuna, Embera, and some English-based Creoles). In these cases, the approximate number of speakers only refers to those that reside in the respective Central American countries. Due to its linguistic diversity and geographical location, Central America has been described as “the linguistic bridge of the Americas” (Moreno Fernández, 2012, p. 1). Nevertheless, Central America remains one of the most understudied regions of the Americas in terms of sociolinguistics. In particular, Honduras and Panama have received little attention. This chapter offers a brief summary of the sociolinguistic work in Central America, with an emphasis on research carried out since 2008. When possible, the literature on both the sociolinguistics of society and the sociolinguistics of language (Fasold, 1991a, 1991b) among the indigenous languages, English-based Creoles, and Spanish are discussed.
Indigenous languages of Central America Eberhard et al. (2022) estimate that 78 languages are spoken by the approximately 49 million inhabitants of Central America. With the exceptions of Spanish, English, and English Creoles, these languages are all indigenous. Guatemala is the most populated and linguistically diverse country on the isthmus. Aside from Spanish and English, the country is home to about 24 indigenous 65
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-7
Brandon Baird Table 5.1 Most widely spoken languages and language families in Central America Language/language family
Country
Approx. no. of speakers
Spanish
Official language of every country except Belize Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras Honduras, Nicaragua Belize, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama Costa Rica, Panama Guatemala, Honduras Official language of Belize, spoken in all countries Panama Panama Costa Rica, Panama
32 million
Mayan languages Miskitu English-based Creoles Ngäbere Garifuna English Kuna Embera Bribri
4.5 million 700,000 400,000 170,000 120,000 120,000 50,000 10,000 7,000
Source: (Eberhard et al., 2022)
languages. On the other hand, El Salvador, the third most populated country and highest in terms of population density, is the least linguistically diverse country with only four indigenous languages. Overall, around 42 of the indigenous languages of Central America are considered to be “in trouble” or “dying” (Eberhard et al., 2022). Mayan languages are the most widespread of the indigenous languages spoken in Central America. The majority, 22, are spoken in Guatemala, where 42% of the population identifies as Maya.1 These languages range from K’iche’ (also spelled K’ichee’ or Quiché), with over one million speakers, to Itza’, with less than 500, (Instituto Nacional de Estadística Guatemala, 2018). In Belize, there are approximately 30,000 speakers of Mayan languages, primarily Q’eqchi’, and there are small pockets of speakers of Q’eqchi’ and Poqomam in El Salvador and of Ch’orti’ in Honduras (Eberhard et al., 2022). Although Mayan languages are among the most well documented Amerindian languages (Aissen et al., 2017), sociolinguistic studies on Mayan languages are, at best, “uneven” (Romero, 2017, p. 379). Research involving language, identity and sociolinguistic attitudes include both Romero (2015) and Baird (2019a) for K’iche’, Hertel and Barnes (2020) for Kaqchikel and García Tesoro (2011) for Tz’utujil. The overall results from these studies reveal an expected shift to Spanish that is primarily occurring among male and urban speakers as they recognize the importance of Spanish, both for economic reasons and for their individual rights. For example, one participant in Baird (2019a, p. 328) noted the need for the Maya to learn Spanish “in order to protect themselves from non-Maya individuals”. Nevertheless, these studies also demonstrate high levels of pride towards Mayan languages by native speakers and corroborate previous findings that the Maya tend to consider the ability to speak a Mayan language as the single most important aspect of Maya identity, as they consider the languages “unequivocally authentic” (England, 2003, p. 735). Studies concerning other indigenous languages report similar findings of language attitudes and identity associated with these languages, such as Bribri and Ngäbere in Costa Rica (Blackwood, 2013; Marín Esquivel, 2022), and Kuna in Panama (Sherzer, 2021). In Belize (Ravindranath, 2009) and Honduras (Brunto, 2021), Garifuna is becoming less common among younger speakers, yet it is still 66
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used and considered vital to their ethnic identity. Several studies have demonstrated different findings along the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. Minks (2010) used the language practices of Miskitu children to argue against language loss. Specifically, she found that although children socialized with others in both Spanish and Nicaraguan Creole English, they chose to speak to most toddlers and infants almost exclusively in Miskitu. In Chappell (2017), the power hierarchy between Spanish and Miskitu varied according to the order of acquisition of the speakers; those that learned Spanish first tended to believe that Spanish was more important than Miskitu and were less likely to teach Miskitu to their children. In El Salvador, Boitel (2021) argues that proficiency in Náhuat (or Nawat) has become so low that speaking a few words in the language is now primarily seen as a symbolic gesture. Perhaps the majority of sociolinguistic research on the indigenous languages of Central America has been done on language revitalization. Although a complete picture is not given here, there have been many efforts among different linguistic communities that have had mixed results. For a more in depth look at this issue, the reader is referred to Coronel-Molina and McCarty (2016). Today, many speakers of indigenous languages are challenging the social and political diglossia of their languages and Spanish, as they promote their languages and cultures via different outlets. Examples include poetry and verbal art in Panama (Sherzer, 2021), hip-hop, movies, and sports in Guatemala (Baird, 2019a; Barrett, 2016, 2017), and smart phone apps in El Salvador (Campos et al., 2021). In fact, in a few instances, such as Kuna in Panama, the loss of speakers of indigenous languages has been reversed (Sherzer, 2021). Nonetheless, there are still many challenges in the revitalization of these languages. For example, linguistic planning and revitalization among the Maya has greatly increased since the 1980s, at the beginning of what is now known as the “Maya movement” (French, 2010). Even so, bilingual education materials are largely only available in the four most common Mayan languages: K’iche’, Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, and Mam. Furthermore, there is a surprising amount of dialectal variation in very small geographical areas among certain Mayan languages, and these phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic differences often index belonging to different townships that may speak the same Mayan language. Consequently, certain efforts to promote the education and revitalization of different Mayan languages have failed because they employ the specific linguistic features of one township in the materials used across multiple townships (Romero, 2017). Freeland et al. (2015) detail the power dynamics between indigenous languages. They show that the Mayangna indigenous language Tuahka on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua is being lost while Miskitu, another indigenous language with more social power and an official status on the regional level, also receives government maintenance and revitalization support. The authors argue that in language maintenance and revitalization efforts we need to consider the ideological positions of the communities that claim the language(s) as their own. In contrast to studies on the sociolinguistics of society of indigenous languages of Central America, studies concerning the sociolinguistics of language are scant. Recent work has largely been carried out by Sergio Romero, who has demonstrated changes in progress and their sociolinguistic indices across different phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic variables. For example, the realization of intervocalic /l/ as [ð] has become an ethnic marker in certain K’iche’ townships (Romero, 2009) and younger generations of Q’eqchi’ speakers in Cobán no longer produce an unrounded /k/ or a trilled /r/ (Romero, 2012). Among bilingual speakers of K’iche’ and Spanish, Baird (2018) finds that K’iche’ intonational contours are highly correlated with both the speakers’ language use and their language attitudes; bilinguals that use Spanish more and have better attitudes towards Spanish tend to produce more Spanish-like contours in their K’iche’. Among non-Mayan indigenous languages, the loss of intervocalic /r/ among speakers of Garifuna in Belize is considered to be an internally motivated change that is occurring alongside a general shift towards English and Belizean Creole (Ravindranath, 2009). Romero (2017, p. 385) states that more variationist research among 67
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Mayan languages is needed as it demonstrates the innovative and dynamic linguistic changes “that contrast with the caricature of immobility and static tradition” that is often associated with the Maya. This statement can of course be extended to all indigenous languages of Central America.
English-based creoles The English-based creoles spoken in Central America are found on the Atlantic coast of the region, in Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Structurally, these creoles are similar to other English-based creoles spoken in the Caribbean as they share historical origins in the slave trade. Although San Andres Creole English is spoken in Panama, it is not discussed here as the majority of its speakers, and the resulting literature, are from Colombia (Bartens, 2013a). See Yakpo and Smith (2020) for further information on English-based Creoles on the Atlantic Coast of Central America and in the Caribbean. Belizean Creole is a thriving lingua franca that, according to Escure (2013), is so popular that it is actually gaining speakers due to its identity value. Salmon and Gómez Menjívar (2016) demonstrate dialectal differences in attitudes towards Belizean Creole as the variety spoken in Belize City was rated significantly more favorably, particularly by males, than the variety spoken in Punta Gorda. Although Belizean Creole has no formal presence in education, Salmon and Gómez Menjívar (2019) found that university student listeners rated Belizean Creole more favorably in classroom settings than in casual settings. The authors hypothesize that the prestige of universities and professors that speak Belizean Creole as a primary reason for the elevated attitudes towards what they call the “burgeoning national language” (p. 259). Nicaraguan Creole English, also known as Miskito Coast Creole, is spoken along the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua and is considered to be mutually intelligible with Belizean Creole (Bartens, 2013b). Nicaraguan Creole English is claimed to be in a stable diglossia with Spanish and Bartens (2013b) argues that the diglossia is starting to shift in ways that are favorable to the creole language. In contrast to Belizean Creole, Nicaraguan Creole English is taught in schools and bilingual programs that used to be Spanish-English three to four decades ago have been restructured to be Spanish-Nicaraguan Creole English programs. Limonese Creole, or Mekaytelyuw (from the English “make I tell you”), comes from a mostly Afro-Jamaican minority that were brought to the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica in the 19th century in order to help build railroads and, later, work for the United Fruit Company. Herzfeld (2016) claims that a key to the survival of Limonese Creole to date has been the local identity attached to it and its use in local music. Nevertheless, both Herzfeld (2016) and Zúñiga (2017) are pessimistic about the future of this language. Studies on the sociolinguistics of language of English-based creoles are scarce. Among the few are Herzfeld’s (2012) analysis of language shifting and power among Spanish-Limonese Creole bilinguals. She finds that speakers use Spanish to demonstrate authority during conversations that are otherwise in Limonese Creole. Additionally, Spence Sharpe (2021) notes one way in which speakers are trying to maintain Limonese Creole is by introducing Spanish loan words into the language at a higher rate than normal. Some studies on Belizean Creole-Spanish code-switching are detailed in the following section and additional studies on the outcomes of Spanish and creoles in contact can be found in Leung and Loschky (2021).
Central American Spanish Although there are significantly more speakers of Spanish than of any other language in Central America, and Spanish is perhaps one of the most studied languages in the world, the linguistic and 68
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sociolinguistic analysis of Central American Spanish has largely been overlooked in favor of Mexican, South American, and European varieties (Quesada Pacheco, 2008). The majority of research before the 1980s was philological and prescriptive in nature and there has only really been a significant increase in any linguistic scholarship in the last two decades. Important volumes on Central American Spanish include a series of dialectal examinations overseen by Quesada Pacheco for both phonetic (2010) and morphosyntactic (2013) variation. Each volume presents the results from the same phonetic or morphosyntactic survey carried out in all seven Central American countries. The majority of the studies on language attitudes towards Central American Spanish focus on the dynamics between Spanish and indigenous languages or English-based creoles. As such, many of these studies were highlighted in the previous sections of this chapter. Similar to Quesada Pacheco’s other volumes mentioned earlier, Chiquito and Quesada Pacheco (2014) provide the results of a Spanish language attitudes survey in which participants rated and compared their own variety of Spanish to that of other Spanish-speaking countries. The survey was carried out in 20 Spanish-speaking countries, including every Central American country except Belize. As previously mentioned, Belize is a unique case in Central America as English is the official language. Although Spanish is the most widely spoken language in this country, it holds a different sociopolitical position than in the rest of Central America. For example, several studies have shown that Spanish is generally perceived unfavorably by Belizeans across multiple sociolinguistic variables. Balam (2013a) reports that, in contrast to many other contexts, it is monolingual Spanish that is marked and pejoratively perceived in Belize whereas code-switching with Belizean Creole is prestigious and seen as a sign of a pan-Afro-Belizean linguistic identity, particularly among younger speakers. Balam and de Prada Pérez (2017) note that although local teachers also tend to view Belizean Spanish in a negative light, they did not perceive it as any better or worse than standard Spanish. Additionally, these teachers had positive attitudes towards the pedagogical use and value of code-switching in the classroom, which is further evidence of Belize being in contrast to the ultra-normative attitudes towards Spanish that exist in many Spanish-speaking countries. The vast majority of work on the sociolinguistics of language in Central American Spanish has been carried out in the past 15 years. During this time, two features have received the most attention. The first is the second person singular pronoun, which includes three variants in Central American Spanish: tú, vos, and usted. Examples of sociolinguistic analyses that have investigated these pronouns include studies in Costa Rica (Michnowicz et al., 2016), El Salvador (Michnowicz et al., 2010), Honduras (Melgares, 2018), Nicaragua (Michno, 2019), and Panama (Quesada Pacheco, 2019). The second linguistic feature that has received considerable attention is the various phonetic realizations of /s/ and their social perceptions, as seen in the Spanish spoken in El Salvador (Brogan & Bolyanatz, 2018), Honduras (Ventura & Baird, forthcoming), Nicaragua (Chappell, 2016a), and Costa Rica (Chappell, 2016b), among several others. Aside from these areas, various sociophonetic studies have analyzed the effects of language contact and bi/multilingualism. Variation in the tap and trill contrast in Spanish has been reported among Belizean Creole-Spanish bilinguals in Belize (Balam, 2013b), Kaqchikel-Spanish bilinguals in Guatemala (McKinnon, forthcoming), and in Spanish in contact with Miskitu, Nicaraguan Creole English, and Sumo/Ulwa in Nicaragua (López Alonzo, 2016). Variationist analyses of voiceless stops include Lamy (2016) among Creole English-Spanish bilinguals in Panama and McKinnon (2020) for Kaqchikel-Spanish bilinguals in Guatemala. Sociolinguistic aspects of the introduction of the glottal stop into Spanish from other languages have been demonstrated both in Guatemala (McKinnon, 2023) and Nicaragua (Chappell, 2013) and Chappell (2020) analyses the lenition of intervocalic /d/ among Miskitu-Spanish bilinguals. In Guatemala, where no Mayan language has /f/ (England & Baird, 2017), Baird and Regan (2022) provide a variationist analysis of K’iche’-Spanish bilinguals 69
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that demonstrate the realization of /f/ as [p]. Baird (2020) also demonstrates social and dialectal effects of K’iche’ on bilinguals’ Spanish vowels. Additional studies among this population reveal the effects of sociolinguistic variables on the intonational contours of the Spanish of these bilinguals (Baird, 2015, 2017, 2019b, 2021a). There are fewer perception studies concerning the Spanish of these multilingual communities, but Baird (2021b, 2023) has shown that both the deletion of wordfinal unstressed vowels, a feature caused by phonological stress patterns in Mayan languages, and the realization of /f/ as [p] are socially stigmatized in Guatemala and index speakers as Maya. Sociolinguistic analyses of morphosyntax in Central American Spanish are more limited. Balam (2015) and Fuller Medina (2014) have shown a steady increase in Belizean Creole-Spanish code switching among younger generations, particularly with the compound verb form hacer “to make/do” + creole/English VERB, e.g., hice sing “I sang”. Among Tz’utujil-Spanish bilinguals in Guatemala, García Tesoro (forthcoming) demonstrates that several speakers are only using a variation of either lo as an invariable morpheme for the third person direct object pronoun or omitting the morpheme altogether.
Conclusion Although sociolinguistic studies in Central America have significantly increased since 2008, the brief summary presented in this chapter demonstrates that there remains ample room for more investigations concerning all of the languages of this region. Numerous linguistic domains remain under- and unstudied, such as signed languages in Central America (Williams, 2010). Additionally, with over half of the languages on the isthmus predicted to be lost in the near future, research on revitalization, identity, and related topics among these specific populations is warranted. The studies that do exist highlight the need to consider the vast sociolinguistic diversity that can occur from one town to the next (Baird, 2020) and that unique regions often provide contradictory results to what may be expected on more expanded language, country, and region levels (Balam & de Prada Pérez, 2017). Thus, it is difficult to pinpoint any specific area as being more important for future investigations as it can be concluded that more sociolinguistic research in Central America is needed across the board.
Note 1 Twenty-one Mayan languages were recognized by name in the 1996 Guatemalan Peace Accords. National census data now includes Chalchitek as the 22nd (Instituto Nacional de Estadística Guatemala, 2018).
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Sociolinguistics in Central America Melgares, J. (2018). “El vos nuestro es, ¡Ey vos chigüín!” Honduran vos as a Marker of National Identity. In J. E. McDonald (Ed.), Contemporary trends in Hispanic and Lusophone lingustics (pp. 191–210). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.15.10mel Michno, J. (2019). Gender variation in address form selection in corner-store interactions in a Nicaraguan community. In C. Félix-Brasdefer & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world (pp. 77–98). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351065382 Michnowicz, J., & Place, S. (2010). Perceptions of second person singular pronoun use in San Salvador, El Salvador. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 3(2), 353–377. https://doi.org/10.1515/ shll-2010-1079 Michnowicz, J., Scott, D. J., & Gorham, R. (2016). The changing system of Costa Rican pronouns of address. In M. I. Moyna & S. Rivera-Mills (Eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas (pp. 243–266). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.10.12mic Minks, A. (2010). Socializing heteroglossia among miskitu children on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Pragmatics, 20(4), 495–522. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20.4.02min Moreno Fernández, F. (2012). América Central: Puente lingüístico de las Américas. Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies, 2. https://doi.org/10.15845/bells.v2i0.275 Quesada Pacheco, M. A. (2008). El español de América Central ayer, hoy y mañana. Boletín de Filología, XLIII, 145–174. Quesada Pacheco, M. A. (2010). El español hablado en América Central: Nivel fonético. Vervuert. Quesada Pacheco, M. A. (2013). El español hablado en América Central: Nivel morfosintáctico. Vervuert. Quesada Pacheco, M. A. (2019). El voseo panameño: Situación actual y actitudes ante su uso. Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 45(1), 227–245. https://doi.org/10.15517/rf l.v45i1.36737 Ravindranath, M. (2009). Language shift and the Speech community: sociolinguistic change in a Garifuna Community in Belize [Doctoral dissertation, Pennsylvania State University]. https://repository.upenn.edu/ edissertations/33 Romero, S. (2009). Phonological markedness, regional identity, and gender in Mayan: The fricativization of intervocalic /l/ in K’iche’. In J. Stanford & D. Preston (Eds.), Variation in Indigenous minority languages (pp. 281–298). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.25.14rom Romero, S. (2012). ‘They don’t get speak our language right’: Language standardization, power and migration among the Q’eqchi’ Maya. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 22(2), 21–41. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1548-1395.2012.01146.x Romero, S. (2015). Language and ethnicity among the K’ichee’ Maya. University of Utah Press. Romero, S. (2017). The labyrinth of diversity: The sociolinguistics of Mayan Languages. In J. Aissen, N. C. England, & R. Zavala Maldonado (Eds.), The Mayan languages (pp. 379–400). Routledge. Salmon, W., & Gómez Menjívar, J. (2016). Language variation and dimensions or prestige in Belizean Kriol. Journal of Pidgeon and Creole Languages, 31, 316–360. https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.31.2.04sal Salmon, W., & Gómez Menjívar, J. (2019). Setting and language attitudes in a creole context. Applied Linguistics, 40(2), 248–264. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx017 Sherzer, J. (2021). From speech play to verbal art. In J. Sherzer (Ed.), Speech play and verbal art (pp. 70–122). University of Texas Press. https://doi.org/10.7560/777682-005 Spence Sharpe, M. (2021). Lexical transfer from Spanish into Limonese Creole. In G. Leung & M. Loschky (Eds.), When Creole and Spanish Collide: Language and cultural contact in the Caribbean (pp. 82–99). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004460157_005 Ventura, J., & Baird, B. forthcoming. Variation of absolute-final /s/ in Tegucigalpa Spanish. In B. Baird, O. Balam, & M. C. Parafita Couto (Eds.), Linguistic advances in Central American Spanish. Brill. Williams, H. (2010). A sociolinguistic survey of the Honduran deaf community. Journal of Language Survey Reports, 1–23. www.sil.org/resources/archives/9181 Yakpo, K., & Smith, N. (2020). The Atlantic. In U. Ansaldo & M. Meyerhoff (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Pidgin and Creole languages (pp. 179–198). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003107224-11 Zúñiga, R. (2017). A sociolinguistic overview of Limon Kryol. In N. Faraclas, R. Severing, C. Weijer, E. Echteld, W. Rutgers, & R. Dupey (Eds.), Memories of Caribbean futures. Reclaiming the pre-colonial to imagine a post-colonial in the languages, literatures, and cultures of the greater Caribbean and beyond (pp. 223–232). University of Curacao.
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6 SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH INTO INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES OF SOUTH AMERICA Viviana Quintero and Serafín M. Coronel-Molina
Introduction This chapter reviews original empirical sociolinguistic studies conducted in the last 15 years on South America’s Indigenous languages and speech communities. Due to our respective fieldwork experiences and expertise as well as the multitude of extant Indigenous languages, the majority of our review focuses on the language and speech communities of Quechua in the Andes and Amazonia. The purpose of this review is to report the most up-to-date sociolinguistic research and highlight the emerging trends and directions in the sociolinguistics of South American Indigenous language and speech communities. Research on this topic has been influenced from the beginning by sociopolitical and political economic transformations spearheaded by Indigenous communities themselves and supported by international agencies and various national organizations. Since the 1970s, calls for social and educational policy and reforms have been the driving force behind much of this research. In fact, these political, cultural, and economic upheavals in the Americas, particularly in South America, have led to significant shifts and realignments in which “old language regimes” have been vigorously challenged and new language regimes have emerged (Coronel-Molina, 2017). Legislative treaties and reforms in Andean nations, in particular, have resulted in the gradual transition of these outdated language regimes. However, policy implementation has been inconsistent and ineffective at best (Andrade Ciudad & Howard, 2021; Haboud et al., 2016). In its broadest sense, sociolinguistics is truly interdisciplinary, since it engages and builds bridges with disciplines such as anthropology (especially linguistic anthropology), psychology, sociology, geography, history, education, and economics, among others. In the sociolinguistics of South American Indigenous language communities, there are two fundamental strands paralleling classic distinctions of micro- and macro-sociolinguistics: language change and variation and a sociology of language, both of which are deeply influenced by the region’s extensive history of language contact and widespread, longstanding multilingualism. As a result, we have broadly organized our review along variationist and interactionist lines. This review chapter begins with a brief description of the geographic distribution and demographic characteristics of these language communities. Then, we discuss language contact DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-8 74
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phenomena, such as bilingualism, multilingualism, and other kinds of linguistic differentiation and innovation, citing key works on distinctive language contact scenarios. We then showcase recent empirical research that exemplifies emerging developments in the sociolinguistics of indexicalities, mobilities, and language vitalities as they are applied to studies of language shift and maintenance, language planning and policy, and bilingual education. We also briefly address the growing surge of language documentation and revitalization research on endangered South American speech communities. Finally, we summarize the current state of sociolinguistic research on the South American Indigenous communities covered in this review, identifying emerging trends and proposing suggestions for future work.
Geographic distribution and demographic characteristics The language ecologies of South America are extraordinarily rich, complex, and diversified, with multilingual, pluricultural, and multiethnic communities residing throughout the continent (Campbell & Grondona, 2012; O’Connor & Muysken, 2014). Spanish is the most widely spoken language in this continent, followed closely by Portuguese. It is also home to speakers of a number of different languages, such as English, German, Italian, Japanese, French, and Dutch. Indigenous languages of South America with significant speaker populations include Quechua in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and, to a lesser degree, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia; Guaraní in Paraguay and, to a lesser degree, Bolivia and Argentina; and Aymara in Bolivia and Peru and, to a lesser degree, Chile. Other notable Indigenous languages with smaller speaker populations include Mapudungun in Chile and Argentina and hundreds of Amazonian languages. In this review, we focus on the language and speech communities of the Andean region, which stretches from the northern to the southern tip of South America and encompasses the following countries: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina (Sichra et al., 2009). Languages such as Quechua, Guaraní, Aymara, and Mapudungun make up most of the linguistic landscape of the Andes and parts of Amazonia. According to various population estimates, Quechua has between 8 and 10 million speakers. As previously noted, due to strong Indigenous sociopolitical movements and unprecedented constitutional reforms, Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní are now officially recognized alongside Spanish in the countries where they are spoken, such as Peru (Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish); Bolivia (Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní, and Spanish); Ecuador (Kichwa and Spanish); and Paraguay (Guaraní and Spanish). Nonetheless, the majority of Indigenous speech communities in South America continue to struggle with getting access to adequate and effective bilingual and intercultural education and language maintenance initiatives. In addition to the Andes, we also focus on languages in Amazonia, one of the world’s most linguistically diverse regions, second only to New Guinea. Amazonian languages are spoken in a patchwork-like manner throughout the region as a result of extensive migration shifts and dispersed settlement patterns (Aikhenvald, 2012; Aikhenvald, 2022a). Along with a number of isolates, the region is home to approximately 350 extant languages grouped into more than 15 language families (Aikhenvald, 2022a). Of these, there are six major language families, namely Arawak, Tupí, Carib, Panoan, Tucanoan, and Macro‐Jê. These span adjacent areas of the following countries (in order of the number of existing Amazonian languages): Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, Guiana, French Guiana, and Suriname (Aikhenvald, 2020). The majority of the Amazonian language communities are small, with almost half having less than 500 speakers. While multilingualism is and has been the norm, the region’s linguistic diversity is diminishing 75
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due to the dominance of Portuguese and Spanish as well as the long-standing linguistic and cultural interactions between the Indigenous speech communities of the Amazon.
Languages in contact: encounters, dynamics, and outcomes This section examines the research on languages in contact in South America, specifically the Andean region. Language contact has had a significant impact on the sociolinguistics of the Andes, as demonstrated in the following important publications: Coronel-Molina and RodríguezMondoñedo (2012b) and Muntendam and Muysken (2021). Andean Spanish refers to the variety of Spanish that has been evolving for over 500 years as a result of prolonged contact between Spanish and Quechua, Aymara, and other Andean languages (for recent discussions of this contact language, see Coronel-Molina & Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, 2012a; Escobar, 2011, 2022). Specific varieties of Andean Spanish include Peruvian Andean Spanish (see Caravedo & Klee, 2016; Delforge, 2012; and Jara Yupanqui, 2013), Bolivian Andean Spanish (see Babel, 2011, 2014, 2016; Fernández-Mallat, 2018; and Pfänder et al., 2009), and Ecuadorian Andean Spanish (see Haboud, 2018; Haboud & Palacios, 2017; Lipski, 2014; Palacios & Haboud, 2018; and Puma Ninacuri, 2022). New findings from this highly productive field of study are opening new threads of inquiry that call into question the notion of a single, monolithic Andean Spanish (see, for instance, Andrade Ciudad, 2016; Andrade Ciudad & Sessarego, 2021 and references therein). A fruitful line of research on Andean Spanish has centered on evidentiality in contact, as the following studies illustrate. Andrade Ciudad (2020) investigates the intricate relationship between evidentiality and epistemic modality in Andean Spanish as a result of Quechua-Aymara contact. Babel (2009) demonstrates how speaker stance and social context can elucidate the usage of dizque in the Valley Spanish of Bolivia, whereas Chang (2018) analyzes dizque, dice que, and dice in the Andean Spanish of northwest Argentina. Evidential usage among Peruvian QuechuaSpanish bilinguals and how these evidentials are translated from Quechua to Spanish is examined by Coronel-Molina (2011a). Finally, García Tesoro (2017) analyzes the evidential and discursive values of the present perfect tense in narratives of Andean migrants in Cusco, Peru. Mixed languages, also known as contact languages, have also received considerable attention. These may emerge when speakers of two or more languages engage with one another in multilingual ecologies during periods of significant societal change, as in the case of Media Lengua (Ecuador) and Jopara (Paraguay). For Media Lengua, a well-known bilingual mixed language that combines Kichwa grammar with a Spanish lexicon, see Gómez Rendón and Paredes (2016); Lipski (2017, 2020); Shappeck (2011); and Stewart (2011, 2013, 2015). For Jopara, a contested bilingual mixed language based on Guaraní with Spanish lexical and grammatical borrowings, see Dietrich (2010, 2021); Dudek and Clements (2021); and Zajícová (2009). With regard to the Amazon, increased attention has been devoted to linguistic diversity, interaction, and innovation (Aikhenvald, 2022a; Epps & Michael, 2017). In particular, the area of intraAmazonian Indigenous multilingualism with its contemporary sociolinguistic and sociocultural dynamics is studied. For example, Epps (2018) shows how intra-Amazonian Indigenous multilingualism is underpinned but not necessarily determined by sociocultural factors, such as linguistic exogamy, a linguacultural system notably present in the Vaupés region of the northwest Amazon. In keeping with this theme, Stenzel and Williams (2021) examine how multilingual Amazonian speakers from the Vaupés region calibrate their speaking practices in actual face-to-face interactions. Such studies could shed much-needed light on the interactional and ideological workings of small-scale multilingualism in regions like the Amazon. 76
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In the context of intensive multilingualism—in this case, among Tariana, Tucano, and Portuguese—and impending language endangerment, Aikhenvald (2022b) analyzes the phonological changes in and awareness of Innovative Tariana, a mixed variety spoken and used by younger generations on social media platforms. Empirically grounded recent work on the diversity of Amazonian Spanish varieties can be found in Fafulas (2020) and references therein, as well as Jara Yupanqui (2012); Valenzuela and Jara Yupanqui (2021); and Vallejos (2014). For information on Guaraní-Spanish language contact in Paraguay, refer to Gómez Rendón (2020); Gynan (2011); Palacios (2019); and Symeonidis (2018). Regarding Mapudungun-Spanish language contact in Chile and Argentina, see Díaz-Fernández (2013); Olate Vinet et al. (2014); Olate Vinet and Wittig González (2019); and Pineda Carrasco et al. (2022). In the following two sections, we turn our attention to critical ethnographic studies that illustrate two theoretical foci: (1) the sociolinguistics of indexicalities, mobilities, and language vitalities in shifting speech communities experiencing migration and transmigration and the aftereffects of these processes; and (2) the semiotic regimentation of language standards and speaker-learner proficiencies by social actors and institutions in situations involving language policy and planning and bilingual education. The majority of the empirical studies discussed in the next two sections share an applied sociolinguistic component, whether it be language policy and planning, bilingual education, or both. Notwithstanding, these sections are divided according to distinct but related theoretical threads.
Indexicalities, mobilities, and emergent language vitalities Andean sociolinguistics has long been preoccupied with rural-to-urban migration and its influence on language shift and maintenance (see Hornberger & Coronel-Molina, 2004 for a detailed discussion on this topic). Especially in the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in international migration and transmigration among Andean individuals and communities. Many of the political, economic, linguistic, and psychological ramifications of these migratory processes are being felt, in particular, by young people. Thus, Indigenous youth are actively producing and negotiating emergent vitalities of language, culture, and identity as they navigate these more recent heteroglossic sociolinguistic ecologies, as evidenced by the following illustrative ethnographic studies. Firestone’s (2017) ethnography focuses on Indigenous youth and their families who have migrated to the Peruvian cities of Ayacucho and Arequipa while maintaining familial and economic ties to their rural birthplaces. She argues that their socioeconomic activities with associated social networks have a significant bearing on Quechua language vitality and maintenance. Those young people and their families who continue to engage in agricultural activities in their rural homes are more likely to preserve the Quechua language, even if they spend significant time in urban settings as newly arrived migrants. This significant finding contradicts the prevailing view that these young people will abandon Quechua once they move to the city. As such, ethnographic analysis of young people’s mobilities and their trajectories along a rural-to-urban continuum can illuminate Quechua and Spanish language vitalities and usages. While Firestone (2017) examines the impact of internal rural-urban migration on Peruvian Indigenous youth’s Quechua language practices, King and Haboud (2011) address the impact of transmigration on the Kichwa language practices of Ecuadorian Indigenous children and adolescents whose parents typically remain abroad for extended periods of time. According to King and Haboud, transmigration and its effects have altered and disrupted the cultural and linguistic socialization of Saraguro children and adolescents as compared to when their parents were present. 77
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They also note that many Saraguro communities were already experiencing a widespread shift from Kichwa to Spanish. However, long-term international migration has drastically accelerated the decline of Kichwa, especially among young people. In Hornberger’s (2014) narrative analysis, Neri Mamani, an Indigenous, Quechua-speaking bilingual educator, recounts how she has traversed geographic and ideological spaces from her natal rural community to urban locales in pursuit of educational and employment opportunities. As an Indigenous woman and a professional, she has reconfigured her sense of indigeneity over time as she moves through these spaces. She has had to recognize and recalibrate the indexical ties that bind perduring dichotomies such as rural/urban, Quechua/Spanish, and Indigenous/nonIndigenous. At the same time, she has developed a conscious self-positioning of her Indigenous identity, in part as a result of her ongoing engagement with a globalizing professional world. Similar dichotomies permeating Neri Mamani’s life journey are also at the heart of Babel’s (2018) ethnography. In it, Babel analyzes how Quechua-Spanish bilinguals from Saipina, a town in Bolivia’s Cochabamba and Santa Cruz departments, categorize themselves and others through their alignments and oppositions to various social categories like language, ethnicity, political affiliation, and sartorial preferences. They do this by mobilizing a number of binary oppositions that populate a semiotic field, such as Quechua speaker/Spanish speaker, highlands/lowlands, and rural/urban. In a semiotic field, Babel’s central theoretical idea, these binary oppositions are frequently bundled together. People, according to Babel, constantly create, invoke, and negotiate these cultural systems of alignment and contrast in their daily interactions with one another.
Regimenting standards and proficiencies in language policy and planning and bilingual education In this section, we examine critical ethnographic sociolinguistic studies on language policy and planning as well as bilingual education. Specifically, we highlight how various Indigenous social actors and their communities regiment ideological projects of language standardization and evaluate multifaceted language proficiencies and heteroglossic linguistic repertoires. What or who is relegated to the background, disregarded, or excluded? This research demonstrates the real-world stakes of such efforts and their repercussions. In a critical-ethnographic study, Coronel-Molina (2015) evaluates the extent to which the High Academy of the Quechua Language has played a role in language planning and policy and Quechua revitalization efforts in the Andean region. He examines the Academy members’ preconceptions and underlying ideologies, and the ways in which these have influenced their decisions and practices, especially in their efforts to standardize Quechua from their own perspectives. His findings reveal that the Academy’s own stances and practices ultimately undermine its stated mission of preserving and revitalizing Quechua. According to Coronel-Molina, the Academy impedes the efforts of other organizations and experts who are also attempting to advance this cause. More significantly, it alienates the rural Quechua-speaking people it claims to serve due to its class-based and purist ideologies that do not consider them to be legitimate or authentic speakers of Quechua. Dealing with another type of community of Quechua language experts and activists, Zavala (2020) examines how local Quechua language experts and activists in Southern Peru interpret and negotiate Peruvian language policy texts pertaining to bilingual education and the language rights of Quechua speech communities. This study takes place in the context of current sociocultural and linguistic ideological shifts in Peruvian society, such as the formation of new government institutions that not only recognize but also seek to expand Quechua language spaces. Zavala analyzes how, in this newly established language regime, these Quechua language experts calibrate and 78
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regiment ideologies of literacy standards for themselves and other Quechua speakers. In doing so, they paradoxically replicate top-down language policies, which run the risk of generating linguistic divisions and hierarchies within the Indigenous communities they seek to support. In addition, Zavala finds that Quechua language expertise in this new language regime is now a marketable commodity that can be traded for professional, symbolic, and material benefits. On the topic of bilingual education, Limerick (2020) examines the benefits and drawbacks of administering a Kichwa language proficiency exam as a requirement for bilingual education employment in Ecuador. He finds that while the national Kichwa exam purports to assess Kichwa language proficiency, it is actually based on a standardized Kichwa register. This penalizes those who do not know this register while potentially favoring urban and middle-class examinees. Limerick claims that both examiners and examinees find this test problematic for determining the suitability of Indigenous people to teach Kichwa. To unpack the semiotics of Quechua language proficiencies, Kvietok Dueñas (2021) tracks the classroom interactions through which T’ika, a bilingual Quechua heritage speaker, is repeatedly referred to by her bilingual Quechua teacher as a Quechua denier, someone who knows or knew Quechua in the past but now refuses or does not care to show her proficiency. In these interactions, according to Kvietok Dueñas, T’ika and her teacher activate a whole array of semiotic resources. These include local language ideologies of what it means to be a Quechua speaker, T’ika’s and her teacher’s respective biographical histories, and the social personae of speaking selves and others circulating in their cultural milieus. In particular, the teacher mobilizes these semiotic resources to assess and regulate T’ika’s Quechua heritage proficiency.
Language documentation and revitalization Given South America’s remarkable linguistic diversity and extremely high levels of language endangerment, particularly in the Amazon, there has been a relative dearth of case studies on language documentation and revitalization in the region (Báez et al., 2016; Crevels, 2012). In the last 15 years, however, an increasing number of South American linguists and sociolinguists, with international funding and local assistance, have embarked on efforts to document endangered languages. Notable examples of these undertakings and programs include the Lenguas de Bolivia project (Crevels & Muysken, 2022), which resulted in the publication of four volumes surveying Bolivia’s Indigenous languages (Crevels & Muysken, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015), and the Ecuadorian interdisciplinary research program, Oralidad Modernidad, with its active documentationrevitalization projects, as described in Haboud (2020). South American country- and regional-level syntheses of comprehensive language revitalization initiatives, projects, and best practices can be found in Moore and Galucio (2016) for Brazil; CoronelMolina (2011b) for Peru; Luykx (2011) for Bolivia; Haboud (2019) for Ecuador; Albarracín (2020), Llanquinao Llanquinao et al. (2019), and Zúñiga and Malvestitti (2018) for the Southern Cone; and Beier and Michael (2018), Sánchez (2016), and Valqui et al. (2014) for the Peruvian Amazon.
Conclusion Since our call in this publication for speaker-centered ethnographies of language shift and multilingualism of South American Indigenous speech communities (Coronel-Molina & Quintero, 2010), we have witnessed significant sociolinguistic research on semiotically grounded understandings of language contact, language shift, and language policy and planning. This new wave of recent scholarship is shedding light on critical issues such as native speakerhood, migration 79
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and mobilities, language standardization, and the semiotic and political economic nature of these multilingual speech communities. As such, this research is demonstrating the potency of semiotic approaches for in-depth analysis of speaker-learner agencies and linguistic hierarchies. A sociolinguistics of language documentation, revitalization, and reclamation should be grounded in ethnographic findings on the semiotics of language, culture, identity, and political economy of endangered speech communities. In this way, we hope that sociolinguistic ethnographers of Indigenous speech communities and those involved in community-anchored language documentation and revitalization can collaborate to describe and make accessible not only the endangered target language but also speakers’ multilingual repertoires. Such efforts could enable these communities to realistically assess the vitality of their language(s) as they strive to strengthen and expand the linguacultural spaces of their repertoires. We enthusiastically anticipate further theoretical and methodological advances and refinements on the themes highlighted in this review (i.e., semiotic-infused sociolinguistic works that break down old dichotomies of language use, as in home versus school spaces, and long-held indexical linkages of rural spaces and Indigenous languages). Through these analyses, we expect to gain more nuanced and illuminating insights into how speakers ideologize their linguistic and associated sociocultural modalities in contemporary heteroglossic sociolinguistic ecologies, thereby paving the way for recognizing new types of speakers-learners of Indigenous languages. We believe these concerns and inquiries will continue to permeate future sociolinguistic work in this region.
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7 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN BRAZIL Ronald Beline Mendes
Introduction Sociolinguistics in Brazil has a long tradition of research on language variation and change, that started not too long after the first Labovian studies on the stratification of New York City English and that have flourished remarkably since the 1980s. Alongside the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom (see Hazen; Brook; and Braber, all this volume), Brazil is one of the countries in the world where variationist studies have provided a thorough and comprehensive description of variables and varieties, with the replication of methods and testing of hypotheses on variation and change. It would be impossible to satisfactorily review the intellectual production of sociolinguistics in Brazil without outlining the history of variationist studies in the country. Also, it would be virtually unfeasible to describe, in one chapter and in addition to a brief history, the accumulated knowledge on Brazilian Portuguese afforded to us by variationist studies, given the number of variables that have been investigated – in multiple varieties, in numerous Brazilian cities (big and small), from diverse (and sometimes divergent) perspectives. For a historical exegesis of Brazilian sociolinguistics, see Reich and Mendes (2022). For a review of studies on the linguistic and social embedding of Brazilian Portuguese variables and on the most relevant processes of change that characterize this language, see Mendes and Guy (forthcoming). In order to provide a review that differs from the two referenced earlier, this chapter focuses on recent sociolinguistic research that privileges the social meaning of variation, instead of work that is first and foremost interested in unveiling patterns of language use in correlation with macrosocial categories. This is by no means a veiled suggestion that big-picture variationist research (in the sense of Eckert, 2012) is less valuable than micro-level analyses of how speakers strategically recruit language features to manage their social lives. Rather, it is a mere delimitation, aimed at contributing to the international access to and appreciation of sociolinguistics in Brazil. In lieu of reiterating other reviews, this chapter complements them. To that end, the following sections highlight ethnographic, experimental and stylistic approaches of socially meaningful variation in Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP). The selection of studies that serve as examples is not intended as all-inclusive. There likely are studies other than those that are brought up here, especially in the first two sections. In addition to the usual limits imposed 85
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-9
Ronald Beline Mendes
by an edited volume, another reason to keep to a small number of examples is in the rigor of how social meanings are understood and of the methods employed to discuss and interpret them. Two assumptions are paramount: that of (indirect) indexicality (Eckert, 2008) and that of underspecification (Eckert, 2016). The former relates to the nature of the link between a linguistic form and a social meaning (or an array of potential social meanings that are ideologically interrelated). The latter is one of three properties of variables pointed out by Eckert (2016) as central: implicitness, underspecification and combinativeness. The last of these properties entitles the final reviewing section of this chapter. Between the two first, underspecification is spotlighted here for the very purpose of foregrounding the case of Brazilian sociolinguistics. The link between linguistic form and social meaning is of an indexical nature because it is established by virtue of co-occurrence in our social lives. In other words, the linguistic form is not the social meaning. Linguistic forms function as indices of social notions. In Brazil, the pronunciation [gɔjʃtɐ] for gosta ‘s/he likes’, with diphthongization of [ɔ] and palatalization of the fricative, can be immediately associated to “carioca” (“from the city of Rio de Janeiro”), but this is not an inherent or essential property of [ɔjʃ]. In fact, such association depends on the access that we have both to the linguistic form and to the social meanings that can potentially be linked to it. It’s possible that the social interpretation of [ɔjʃ] as “carioca” is something that southeastern Brazilians do more immediately than Northern Brazilians, for example. In addition, we must consider that, locally (in Rio de Janeiro, for example), [ɔjʃ] can function as an index of other social meanings: “meticulous”, “charming”, “from Leblon”, “snobbish” – depending on who speaks, on who listens, on the setting or social situation in which the interaction develops, on the topics talked about, on stances that are taken “here and now”, on affect among the interactants (empathy, distancing, indifference, etc.). The indexicality of linguistic forms is potential because it is not given; it is utterly dynamic and rooted in interaction, although an indexical link can be more enregistered than others (Agha, 2007), as in the case of [ɔjʃ] and “carioca” in Southeastern Brazil. The idea of underspecification (as well as implicitness and combinativeness) is closely related (if not derived from) the concept of indexicality. In Eckert’s (2016, p. 70) words, underspecification is a design feature of language itself, which allows a small number of forms to serve a large number of purposes. Again, the associations between linguistic form and social meanings, and the ideological relations between social meanings themselves, depend on all of those contextual components mentioned earlier. This entails that the meanings found by an ethnographic study of local practices are not definitive, but provisional. Equally, the meanings unveiled by a perception experiment focusing on one linguistic variable are not necessarily the meanings that the corresponding variants will always and unfailingly index. To date, these ideas are not always evident in the sociolinguistic research in Brazil that purportedly centers on the social meaning of language variation. If Eckert (2012) states that third-wave sociolinguistic research is in its infancy, ten years later it is probably experiencing adolescence. In Brazil, actual second- and third-wave sociolinguistics are incipient today. Nonetheless, the discussion of presuppositions around the approach of the social meaning of variation (like the ones briefly appraised earlier) has attracted increasing attention (see Camacho, 2010; Mendes, 2017; Battisti & Oushiro, 2022; Catani & Oushiro, 2022, and a translation of Eckert’s, 2012 article in Oliveira et al., 2022).
Ethnographic approaches Although earlier work has been dedicated to local social meaning of linguistic variation, by attempting to look beyond the interest of big-picture patterns, much rarer is actual ethnographic 86
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work, that centers on a group of speakers and their practices, and that does not assume macrosocial categories as necessarily locally important. Bortoni-Ricardo (1985), for example, analyzed the linguistic production of rural migrants that moved to a satellite town next to Brasilia, Brazil’s capital (founded in the 1960s). Her main interest was to understand if and how such speakers would accommodate to urban patterns. Among other variables, she analyzed first- (1PP) and third-person-plural (3PP) subject-verb agreement and found that, differently from what had been verified until then for various communities in Brazil, men (not women) favored the standard (as opposed to the vernacular) variants. Her interpretation was that “rurban” (or rural-turned-urban) male speakers were more in touch with the social value of standard forms, since they were more strongly involved in the job market. Another example is Rodrigues (1987), who also studied plural subject-verb agreement, but in a São Paulo favela. Her focus was São Paulo as a megacity, and more specifically the fact that, in those days, speakers in the São Paulo favelas were predominantly migrants from rural areas of all over Brazil. According to her analyses, the nonstandard, vernacular variant of 1PP subject-verb agreement (as in nós vai, instead of nós vamos ‘we go’) is more socially meaningful than 3PP (eles vai, instead of eles vão ‘they go’): both configure uncultivated forms, but the former indexes “rural” (in the city). Despite their interest in socially and locally meaningful forms, these studies both started with big-picture questions, and with hypotheses based on the habitual macrosocial categories (particularly sex, age and level of education). Approximately 20 years later, we observe something different. Inspired by Rodrigues (1987), Coelho (2006) carried out research in another São Paulo favela. Originally, he entered the community with a particular variable in mind (first person plural pronoun, nós or a gente ‘we’), and given the well-established tradition of seeking to unveil patterns related to the three social variables aforementioned, he was ready to collect a sample stratified by them. However, the reality he found soon after starting his ethnographic work in the community made it clear that he would not be able to collect data with certain categories of people (for example, older men with higher levels of education, who were virtually nonexistent in the favela). Additionally, after months of ethnographic observation and participation in the community, Coelho (2006) realized that the neighborhood dynamics was based on images (p. 73) and ideologies that groups of neighbors developed about their own and others’ lifestyles, which in turn were largely based on their roles and activities in the neighborhood. He identified six groups: the co-op seamstresses; the daycare workers; husbands and wives involved in the Neighborhood Association; girls that participated in the Youth Protection project; sons and daughters of parents involved in the Neighborhood Association; and boys who spent their days playing soccer. These boys are locally referred to as manos ‘bros’, and according to Coelho (2006), they constitute the group that more often and strongly exaggerate the use of vernacular forms, namely the pronoun nós ‘we’, pronounced as [nɔjs], (instead of the innovative and generally more frequent a gente ‘we’ – see Zilles (2005), for example), followed by a singular verb form (as in nóis é, literally ‘we is’). In other words, the “soccer bros” would avoid the innovative pronoun (which was, already then, becoming the unmarked form); would pronounce nóis in a way that goes against the positive evaluations of its “correct” pronunciation; and would avoid the prescribed subject-verb agreement. All in all, the combination of these variants was one of the local ways of “doing bro”, a way of taking a divergent stance in relation to the other local, socially conformant types (especially the “well-behaved” sons and daughters involved in the Neighborhood Association). Coelho (2006) does not use the concept of enregisterment (Agha, 2007), but he does interpret the neighborhood manos as a (life)style that locally translated (and therefore locally enregistered) a broader ethos, defined by a reactive attitude towards middle-class values. The form “é nóis” 87
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‘it’s we’ (which opens the title of his thesis), commonly used in hip hop lyrics, was becoming an expressive trademark, a lexicalized feature locally employed to convey the very idea of groupness (us against them). In this sense, this is probably one of the first sociolinguistic analyses in Brazil that privileged the local dynamics of social meaning, although it constitutes yet another investigation of two of the most well-studied variables in Brazilian sociolinguistics (see Mendes & Guy, forthcoming; Reich & Mendes, 2022). Another example of research focusing on local social meanings of variation is SalomãoConchalo (2015) (see also Camacho & Salomão-Conchalo, 2016). Influenced mainly by Eckert (2000) and (2012), Salomão-Conchalo (2015) conducted a two-year long ethnographic examination of students at a high school in São José do Rio Preto (western region of São Paulo state). She was able to identify seven groups of students, based on their local social practices (including musical taste, school activities and metalinguistic commentary): funkers (in the sense of fans and lovers of Brazilian funk music), rockers, skaters, goths, preppies, manos (bros) and eclectic. The author carefully describes these groups as communities of practices that take distinctive positions in relation to one another and to the school. Since funkers and the eclectic were particularly antagonistic to one another, she centered her linguistic analyses mainly around these two groups, although each of the seven groups was relevant for her interpretations of styles. She analyzed two variables – plural noun-phrase and subject-verb agreement – and found that the incidence of standard plural agreement was extremely high in the speech of eclectic students and of those that sought to affiliate to that group. Conversely, funkers and their acolytes frequently avoided standard agreement. The interest of including this study in the present review is then in the fact that these variables are particularly sensitive to schooling and, nevertheless, local practices and persona construction were more important for the students’ variable use of plural agreement than “the laws of school”. In this sense, Salomão-Conchalo (2015) represents a good example of second-to-thirdwave sociolinguistics in Brazil. To end this section, Oliveira (2021) is one of the most recent studies in Brazil that concentrates on local social meanings of variation via ethnographic analysis. He investigates how vowel ingliding ([ɛ]~[ɛɐ], [ɔ]~[ɔɐ], in words like f[ɛɐ]sta ‘party’ and h[ɔɐ]ra ‘hour’), is used in Porto Alegre to convey “coolness” and “informality” (in the sense of sounding laidback), in association with people ideologically linked to Bom Fim (a specific neighborhood in Porto Alegre). He does not perform ethnographic work himself, but resorts to ethnographic studies of the neighborhood done by Silva (1991, 2007, described in Oliveira, 2021). By means of qualitative and quantitative analyses, he contrasts data extracted both from sociolinguistic interviews recorded in Porto Alegre and from a documentary film about Bom Fim. He interprets the general patterns he finds in light of Bourdieu’s social theory, being able to conclude that ingliding is locally useful to provide symbolic profit in the composition of styles that index freedom, innovation, youth and transgression.
Sociolinguistic perception The publication of Eckert (2008), Campbell-Kibler (2009, 2010) and Eckert (2012) contributed to burgeoning research on sociolinguistic perception in Brazil (see Mendes, 2016a; Mendes, 2016b; Freitag et al., 2018; Canever & Mendes, 2019; Oushiro, 2019; Barcellos, 2020; Santos, 2020; Mendes, 2020; Sene, 2022; Carvalho & Lopes, 2022, inter alia). Brazilian sociolinguistics has certainly witnessed more numerous studies, and for longer years, on “attitudes and beliefs”, which evidently constitute work on the social evaluation of variants and varieties; however, the ones selected for review in this section are specifically motivated by the notion of indexicality and the presupposition that the social meanings of linguistic forms are potential and underspecified. 88
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Methodologically, the studies cited here were conducted not by asking speakers about what they think of variables, variants, dialects, etc, but by experimentally stimulating listeners with (pairs of) audio guises (accompanied or not by other information, like images or written text), so that they could react to speech signal without being aware of the linguistic forms under scrutiny. In the interest of conciseness, three of the studies listed earlier are highlighted here: Oushiro (2019), Santos (2020) and Sene (2022). The first is interested in the social meanings of coda (-r) in São Paulo, where the most frequent pronunciations are the tap and the retroflex, the latter of which is generally commented on as “not from the city”, that is, “less urban” or “more countryside”. Informed by a robust analysis of the production of these variants of (-r), she designs a modified matched-guise experiment in order to verify how multiple social meanings can be indexed by them. The responses volunteered by 185 listeners show that, although (-r) is strongly associated to place, further inferences arise, in terms of class, education, as well as personal traits like “articulate” and “hardworking”. Beyond the indexicality of (-r) in São Paulo, the author discusses the use of Minimum Spanning Trees (Gower & Ross, 1969, in Oushiro, 2019) as a replicable computational method for the representation of indexical fields. She explains that this method does not provide a mental mapping of how listeners link social meanings to linguistic forms or other meanings, but nevertheless allows an objective display of how close or distant meanings are to one another and to the variants under study. Santos (2020) analyzes how 217 listeners from São Luís (SL) and 284 from São Paulo (SP) perceive four speakers (identified as from SL or SP) through guises defined by subjunctive or indicative morphology. His stimuli are uttered subordinate clauses with embora ‘although’ or talvez ‘maybe’, and noun clauses embedded as objects of verbs querer ‘want’ or acreditar ‘believe’ – all of which should be prescriptively in the subjunctive, but are commonly also structured with indicative verb forms. The impetus for his study comes originally from metacommentary (such as “SP speakers do not use subjunctive”, and “the SL variety of Portuguese is the best in Brazil”), but also from previous variationist analyses of subjunctive/indicative alternation in samples of BP spoken in both cities. The responses gathered by Santos (2020) with his experiment indicate that all four speakers are perceived as more competent-sounding when listened to in their subjunctive guises, both by SL- and SP-listeners. However, SL-speakers were perceived as more serious and formal than SP-speakers, in their subjunctive guises. Additionally, SP-speakers were perceived as more Paulistano-sounding (that is, they sound more genuinely like speakers from the city of São Paulo) in their indicative guises, suggesting a closer indexical link between indicative forms and SP. Another result worth mentioning here is based on perceived education: while SL-listeners rated the speakers more highly in their subjunctive guises, verbal mood had no effect in the responses by SP-listeners, indicating that the perceptions associated to these verbal mood forms are socially stratified in SL, but not in SP. As this is the first analysis of social meanings linked to subjunctive/ indicative alternation, it broadens perceptual approaches of grammatical variation. Finally, Sene (2022) is the first study in BP of the effects of pitch and coda (s)-lengthening in perceptions of gender and sexuality. Although previous research reported on metacommentary regarding pitch in relation to gender/sexuality, no perception studies of (s)-lengthening had been carried out before. His main questions were: How robustly are male voices perceived as less masculine-sounding when mean pitch is manipulated to a higher value? Do pitch and /-s/ lengthening interact in the perception of male voices? To address them, he designed a matched-guise experiment as between-subjects for pitch and within-subjects for /-s/, using 10–15 seconds-long clips in which eight male speakers talk about what they liked to do depending on the weather. Fifty participants listened to the voices in their original pitch, first with all coda (-s) tokens in their original length (.12–.17 ms) and then with longer (-s) (.29–.34 ms). Another 51 participants listened to the same 89
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voices but in guises manipulated for higher mean pitch (+30Hz), first with (-s) tokens in their original length and then with longer (-s). Participants rated the voices according to how serious, intelligent, gay and masculine they sounded, and checked non-scalar perceived characteristics (tall, young, rich, shy, friendly, good-looking and hard-working). By means of principal components analysis (PCA) of the scalar responses, he found an expected negative correlation between sounding masculine and gay (first component) and a positive correlation between sounding serious and intelligent (second component). Using scores from the first PCA component as the dependent variable, he ran mixed-effects regression analyses and found an interactive effect of pitch and (-s) in his listeners’ responses: all voices sound less masculine/gayer in their higher-pitched and longer (-s) guises and more masculine/less gay in their original guises. Additional tests also indicate that the effect of (-s)-lengthening is greater for higher pitch for every speaker. Listeners’ sexual orientation does not correlate with their responses, but male respondents overall tended to rate all voices as less masculine/gayer-sounding than female respondents. In addition to unveiling interactive, robust effects of mean pitch and (-s) in how male voices are perceived in BP, this study informs future work interested in the combination of these and other variables in the performance of gender and sexuality, and contributes to the larger question of how broadly pitch and (-s)-lengthening potentially index gender and sexuality across languages.
Combinativeness Podesva (2007) points up four ways to study the social meaning of language variation: (i) by ethnographically analyzing the situated employment of variable forms, in order to comprehend how speakers strategically use them in their daily lives; (ii) by inspecting the history of how variants and varieties become enregistered through time (in the sense of Agha, 2007); (iii) by carrying out perception experiments; and (iv) by analyzing how variants are meaningfully clustered in the situated projection of personae and the development of styles. In Brazilian sociolinguistics, the last of these approaches (based on the idea that linguistic variants do not take on meaning in isolation – Eckert, 2016) is certainly the least common. As a matter of fact, the only exception to date is Mendes (2018), who analyzes how four speakers combine the variants of two variables in specific passages of sociolinguistic interviews: standard or nonstandard noun-phrase agreement (NPagr) and the pronunciation of nasal /e/ (in words like setenta ‘seventy’) (EN) as a monophthong [en] or a diphthong [ejn]. His interest in these variables come from results of previous perception experiments that looked into their association with gender and sexuality meanings. Mendes (2016a) demonstrates that four male speakers are consistently perceived as less masculine-sounding and gayer-sounding in their standard plural agreement guises. Mendes (2016b) shows that [ejn] has a positive effect on how a female voice can sound more feminine and how a male voice can sound more effeminate. Finally, with stimuli that combine the variants of (NP-agr) and (EN), Mendes (2020) designed an experiment to test whether these variables have interactive or independent effects in perceptions of gender/sexuality. He found that both are significant predictors for masculinity/femininity, but the two do not interact. Rather, voices are perceived as sounding less masculine/more feminine in either the diphthong- or the standard NP-guises, independently. He also found that listener factors (sex, age, friendship networks, among others) do not play a role in how the speakers’ voices were perceived. Based on these findings, Mendes (2018) analyzed how four male Paulistanos recorded by the SP2010 Project (Mendes & Oushiro, 2012) utilized standard (NP-agr) and [ejn] stylistically. Considering that male voices were perceived as effeminate- and gay-sounding when listened to in experimental guises with these variants, his idea was to verify whether these speakers would 90
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employ them strategically, throughout their sociolinguistic interviews. A methodological interest of his analytical exercise was to provide an example of how difficult it is to interpret stylistic deployment of variants in a traditional sociolinguistic interview, since there is no situational variation (a speaker is recorded while talking to a same interlocutor, at the same place). It is true that a speaker can take different stances throughout an interview, and this is the premise that licensed Mendes’s (2018) analysis. But the assumption of style as differentiation, a cluster of variants that index social meanings that emerge contextually, is less verifiable when a speaker talks to the same interviewer, than when they engage in conversations with different people, in varied situations and settings, with contrasting social intentions that arise in the interactional “here and now”. In his analysis, he started by looking for the passage in the interview with each speaker that contained higher rates of both standard (NP-agr) and diphthongized [ejn]. Figure 7.1 displays the rates of CNp (concordância nominal padrão ‘standard noun-phrase plural agreement’) and [ejn] in intervals of ten minutes in the interview with Carlos (the pseudonym for one of the analyzed speakers). After identifying the ongoing conversational topic, he would then pinpoint a shorter excerpt in which CNp and [ejn] more clearly clustered. Finally, he would compare that excerpt with others, in the interview with the same speaker, in which either these variants were not clustered or the corresponding variants of the same variable (nonstandard NP-agr and monophthongal [en]) were more present, in order to try to interpret their meaningfulness by contrast. As indicated in Figure 7.1, the excerpt in which Carlos presents higher rates of both CNp and [ejn] stretches from the 10th to the 20th minute. Considering that this speaker maintains a high rate of CNp during the whole interview (never below 95%), one could propose that this is the passage in which Carlos, a generally masculine-sounding speaker (see Mendes, 2016a), sounds relatively more effeminate (considering the indexical link between [ejn] and femininity). However, this would be a hasty interpretation. First of all, the indexical link between these linguistic forms and femininity is not direct. Secondly, we should ask ourselves whether, in the interview, Carlos employs CNp stylistically, since there is hardly any variation. Variable (NP-Agr) is a stereotype of education, and the general tendency is that the higher the level of education, the higher the rates
100 CNp 80 [ejn]
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Figure 7.1 Rates of standard (NP-agr) CNp and of [ejn] in every ten-minute interval throughout the interview with Carlos
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of CNp (see Mendes & Oushiro, 2015 for details and further references). Thirdly, as considered earlier here, we can only interpret stylistic practices of variants by contrasting clusters of variants, considering that their meaning is context-dependent. Figure 7.2 displays the occurrences of CNp and [ejn] throughout the interview with Carlos, and Figure 7.3 highlights the clustering of these variants in the 10- to 20-minute interval, in which he talks about family and work. After the interviewer’s question about whether, in his family, women are usually housewives and men provide for the family, Carlos says that his mother took care of him and his sister until they were about 13 years old, when she had to go back to work (for “economic reasons”), and then added that, in general, the men in his family would not habitually help with housekeeping (“they were more committed to their professional lives”). By taking into account only the topics Carlos is talking about in this passage, we could perhaps expect lower rates of diphthongized [ejn], to signal stereotypical masculinity and masculine versus feminine roles. However, here too, such interpretation would be rather rudimentary, to the extent that it is not rooted in a comparison between Carlos and himself. Actually, such interpretation sort of assumes a more direct, essential link between [ejn] (or [ejn]+CNp) and effeminacy in a performance of masculinity (if we were able to state with certainty that Carlos is performing masculinity in this passage). A few minutes later in the interview, the interviewer asks Carlos what he thinks of gay marriage – a question that potentially prompts a clearer stance based on gender and sexuality ideologies. In his response, Carlos adopts a very sympathetic tone and says that he is not a homosexual, but he feels like people should be free to fall in love and live with whomever they like. He goes on to give examples of relationships and human rights, and clearly positions himself in favor of gay marriage.
CNp [ejn]
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Figure 7.2 Occurrences of CNp and [ejn] throughout the interview with Carlos
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Figure 7.3 Clustering of CNp and [ejn] in the 10- to 20-minute interval of the interview with Carlos
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In this passage, CNp and [ejn], although less numerously than in the previous, co-occur with peaks of mean pitch, that are progressively higher: a pessoa tem que ter liberdade ‘people should be free’ (mean pitch = 275.13 Hz); eu particularm[ejn]te acho que é uma escolha da pessoa ‘I personally think it’s a matter of choice’ (374.05 Hz); ninguém deveria se intrometer ‘nobody should intrude’ (in people’s right to choose) (480.89 Hz). Carlos is not seeking to sound gay, by combining [ejn] with peaks of mean pitch (although, according to Sene 2022, higher pitch indexes effeminacy in male voices). But in comparison to the previous interval, in which Carlos was talking about work and family, here he seems to be distancing himself from a stereotypical “macho” stance. More evident still is the presentation of a thoughtful, judicious persona, who is capable of nuance, in face of a likely threatening question presented by the interviewer. Again, this interpretation is potential and falsifiable – not just because of the nature of indexicality, but also because the resources available in a sociolinguistic interview are limited, for the interpretation of stylistic moves. The description of these analyses by Mendes (2018) is not exhaustive: further comparisons could be made between Carlos and himself, as well as between Carlos and the other three speakers, whose stylistic deployment of CNp and [ejn] he explored. However, it serves the purpose of this section, which is to briefly review the sole example of stylistic research done in Brazilian Portuguese that is grounded on the social meaning of linguistic variation.
Conclusion This chapter shows that sociolinguistics in Brazil is producing more and more studies focused on the social meaning of language variation, especially in terms of experimental approaches of sociolinguistic perception, based on the notions of indexicality and underspecification. Ethnographic research that discusses locally meaningful language use is still sporadic. Even rarer are studies that look into the agentive combination of variants with stylistic purposes. With the growing interest in the social meaning of variation, sociolinguistics in Brazil will likely witness the development of new ethnographic investigations, as well as studies on style as social differentiation.
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Ronald Beline Mendes Coelho, R. F. (2006). É nóis na fita! Duas variáveis linguísticas numa vizinhança da periferia paulistana. O pronome de primeira pessoa do plural e a marcação de plural no verbo [Ms. Thesis, University of São Paulo]. Eckert, P. (2000). Linguistic variation as social practice. Blackwell. Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4), 453–476. Eckert, P. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 87–100. Eckert, P. (2016). Variation, meaning and social change. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics. Theoretical debates (pp. 68–75). Cambridge University Press. Freitag, R., Cardoso, P. B., & Gois, P. Y. (2018). A percepção da variação na primeira pessoa do plural: Efeitos do monitoramento estilístico e da urbanização. In N. Lopes, C. Carvalho, & C. Souza (Eds.), Fala e contexto no português brasileiro: Estudos sobre variação e mudança linguísticas. EDUNEB. Mendes, R. B. (2016a). Nonstandard plural noun phrase agreement as an index of masculinity. In E. Levon & R. B. Mendes (Eds.), Language, sexuality and power. Studies in intersectional sociolinguistics (pp. 105–129). Oxford University Press. Mendes, R. B. (2016b). Diphthongized (en) and the indexation of femininity and Paulistanity. Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos, 58(3), 425–444. Mendes, R. B. (2017). A terceira onda da sociolinguística. In J. L. Fiorin (Ed.), Novos caminhos da Linguística (pp. 103–124). Contexto. Mendes, R. B. (2018). Percepção e performance de masculinidades: Efeitos da concordância nominal de número e da pronúncia de /e/ nasal [Full-professorship dissertation, Departamento de Linguística. Universidade de São Paulo]. Mendes, R. B. (2020). (CN) e (EN) em percepções de competência, gênero e paulistanidade. In C. R. Brescancini & V. N. de O. Monaretto (Eds.), Sociolinguística no Brasil: Textos selecionados (pp. 241–264). EDIPUCRS. Mendes, R. B., & Guy, G. (forthcoming). Language variation and change in Portuguese. In L. Oushiro & A. M. Carvalho (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of Portuguese. Oxford University Press. Mendes, R. B., & Oushiro, L. (2012). O paulistano no mapa sociolinguístico brasileiro. Alfa 56 (3) Mendes, R. B., & Oushiro, L. (2015). Variable number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese: An overview. Language and Linguistics Compass, 9(9), 358–368. Oliveira, S. G. de, 2021. Ingliding as stylistic practice in Porto Alegre (RS). Diadorim, 23(1), 85–113. Oliveira, S. G. de, Rockenbach, L., & Gutierres, A. (2022). As três ondas do estudo da variação. Organon, 37(73), 268–291. Oushiro, Livia, 2019. A computational approach for modeling the indexical field. Revista de Estudos Linguísticos, 27(4), 1737–1786. Podesva, R. (2007). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11, 478–504. Reich, U., & Mendes, R. B. (2022). Sociolinguistics. In J. Kabatek & A. Wall (Eds.), Manual of Brazilian Portuguese linguistics (pp. 283–307). De Gruyter. Rodrigues, Angela C. S. (1987). A concordância verbal no português popular em São Paulo [PhD dissertation, University of São Paulo]. Salomão-Conchalo, M. S. (2015). A variação estilística na concordância nominal e verbal como construção de identidade social [Tese de Doutorado, UNESP. São José do Rio Preto]. Santos, W. S. dos (2020). Percepções sociolinguísticas acerca da variação subjuntivo/indicativo em São Luís e São Paulo [PhD dissertation, University de São Paulo]. https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8139/ tde-08062020-205446/en.php Sene, M. G. de (2022). A percepção sociolinguística de gênero e sexualidade: Efeitos da duração de /s/ e do pitch médio [PhD dissertation, Universidade Estadual Paulista (Araraquara)].
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8 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN HISPANIC SOUTH AMERICA Manuel Díaz-Campos and Matthew Pollock
Introduction Spanish is the official language of eighteen countries in the Americas, as well as the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Equatorial Guinea, and Spain. While Latin America contains most of the world’s Spanish speakers, it is also a multilingual region. After a history of colonialism, waves of immigration in the twentieth century, and ongoing contact along the Brazilian border, there have been numerous opportunities for contact and variation stemming from European languages. Afro-Hispanic populations, arriving through the European slave trade, have played a crucial role in Latin American Spanish. Additionally, there has been massive influence from contact with the over 650 Indigenous communities documented by Sichra (2009) in the region, including major languages like Quechua (i.e., in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru), Aymara (i.e., in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru), and Guaraní (i.e., in Paraguay). This linguistic diversity hints at the rich sociolinguistic environment surrounding Latin American varieties of Spanish. The chapter begins by focusing on variationist studies examining sociophonological, morphosyntactic, pragmatic, and discourse variation. In presenting an overview of variationist sociolinguistic research, we emphasize current language use in context. The studies we discuss are the most recent entries in the long variationist tradition in Latin America. The final half of the chapter turns its focus to the sociolinguistics of society, examining issues of multilingualism, language policy, and ideology. These topics give insight into cases of language contact across Latin America, including contexts where Indigenous, European, and African languages are used alongside Spanish. The chapter closes by pointing out topics that merit further study, as we in the field of Hispanic sociolinguistics have only begun to document how norms differ across many of these communities. There is a rich sociohistorical and demographic diversity in this region that we examine to provide greater insight into community dynamics and social values. While the chapter concentrates on Hispanic South America, reference is occasionally made to relevant studies in other parts of Latin America.
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-10
Manuel Díaz-Campos and Matthew Pollock
Variationist sociolinguistic research The study of language variation is central to the field of sociolinguistics, helping determine how languages evolve over time and space according to linguistic and social factors. This first half of the chapter provides a state-of-the-field of some of the most important research conducted on varieties of Latin American Spanish in the last two decades. While many of these sociolinguistic variables are shared with varieties of Spanish spoken outside of Latin America, our focus in this chapter remains on usage in this region.
Sociophonology This section provides an overview of key Latin American sociophonological and sociophonetic topics, examining social meaning at the phonetic and phonological level in recent literature. We organize these sections by manner of articulation, moving from sonorant (i.e., vowels, liquids and nasals) to obstruent (i.e., plosives, fricatives and affricates) sounds.
Vowels The Spanish vocalic system is often described as having few geographic vowel contrasts, likely a result of the symmetry and simplicity of its five-component vowel system: [a e i o u] (e.g., Lipski, 2011). However, studies of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Andean Spanish vowels show that variability exists in certain contexts, often related to rural identity and language contact. Vowel raising, where ‘grande’ large [ɡɾan̪de] becomes [ɡɾan̪di], has been described as a sociolinguistic marker in several countries. In Castañer, Puerto Rico, a rural region, Oliver Rajan (2017) finds that raising indicates in-group identity and community membership, but also that it is disappearing in the speech of young speakers and those who have immigrated to urban areas. Meanwhile, in Michoacan, Mexico, Barajas (2021) shows that community connections help predict vowel raising in the town of El Colongo. Socially, migrants who worked in the U.S. tend to have fewer instances of vowel raising than community members with no mobility. In both Mexico and Puerto Rico, this phenomenon serves as a rural in-group marker that is disappearing in more mobile groups. Lipski describes a vowel phenomenon he labels variation, a process of alternative raising and lowering between high and mid vowels, in Andean Spanish. Lipski (2021) relates alternation to Quechua and Aymara contact, as these languages have a three-vowel system whose vowel space must be restructured when bilingual speakers produce sounds in the Spanish five-vowel system. In a study of Quechua-dominant bilinguals in northern Ecuador, Lipski (2015) finds that mid and high vowel productions alternate, becoming prototypical high or mid Spanish vowels, respectively, in around half of all cases. Although this phenomenon is frequent among Quechua-dominant bilinguals in rural areas, increasing access to education and exposure to Spanish among younger generations is already bringing their vowels more in line with monolingual norms. The third phenomenon, vowel devoicing in unstressed syllables, is documented in both Andean and Mexican Spanish. Lipski (2021) notes that a following /s/ strongly favors word-internal devoicing, which may reflect contact with the phonetic patterns of Quechua and Aymara. However, in Cuzco, Peru, Delforge (2012) also observes this phenomenon, finding connections to rural identity and speakers from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Given the documentation of devoicing outside of contact sites, more research is needed to support the theory that this is a contact phenomenon. 96
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Although often overlooked, vowel variation would benefit from further research to better clarify the rich socio-cultural contexts of Spanish contact with Indigenous languages. Identifying communities that adopt innovative variants can help the field track the diffusion of these phenomena and understand how they are socially conditioned.
Liquids and nasals Acoustic research on the alveolar trill shows that several variants exist in Latin America alongside the normative production with two or more occlusions. These variants include an occlusion-free production described as approximant or fricative, as well as syllable-initial variants in Puerto Rico that can be velar, uvular and glottal (Delgado‐Díaz & Galarza, 2015). Sociolinguistic examination of the social stratification of these variants often indicates that prestige is associated with the normative variant. For instance, Bradley and Willis (2012) found that women in Veracruz, Mexico, favored productions with two or more occlusions. A recent matched-guise study by Delgado-Díaz et al. (2021) has determined that, while velar variants are negatively evaluated, they are perceived as particularly negative when produced by female participants. Syllable-final liquids have been described as undergoing two main processes: gliding and gemination. Gliding, which occurs in the context of tongue lowering, yields a vocalized [i]; e.g., mujer ‘woman’ [mu-ˈheɾ] -> [mu-ˈhei] (RAE, 2011). Gemination can also take place, when a preceding or following consonant lengthens due to coarticulation; corbata ‘tie’ [koɾ‐ˈβa‐ta] -> [kob‐ˈba‐ta]. These processes have been documented in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the rural center of Cuba (Lipski, 2011), Panama, and along the Colombian coast. While gliding and gemination are discussed in descriptive reference texts, they are rarely examined using sociolinguistic methodologies, warranting future quantitative and ethnographic research (cf. RAE, 2011). Nasal phenomena also merit discussion. Velarization in syllable-final position, where pan ‘bread’ [pan] becomes [paŋ], is widespread, with attestations throughout the Caribbean, southern Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador, coastal Colombia and Ecuador (RAE, 2011). Production of phrase-final alveolar nasals as bilabial is less common, being discussed mainly in the context of Yucatan Spanish. Examining productions in real-time across age groups, Michnowicz (2021) expands on the findings of an earlier study, in which he had determined that middle-aged female Mayan speakers tended to produce alveolar nasals in final position as bilabial [m]. The updated project, examining diachronic data from the 2000s and 2010s, shows that bilabial production has dropped among younger speakers, possibly as the result of the changing social environment of the Yucatan, where contact with non-local tourists has increased use of the alveolar form. Sonorant consonants provide fertile ground for future research. While considerable work has been done on the trill in the Caribbean-adjacent context, the lateral, rhotic tap, and nasals would benefit from additional examination through a variationist lens.
Plosives We now turn to obstruent consonants, beginning with the six Spanish plosives (i.e., /p t k/ and /b d g/). While the phonemes contrast in syllable-initial position (e.g., peso ‘weight’ versus beso ‘kiss’), contrast is neutralized in syllable-final position, allowing for variation through Latin America that includes full retention, weakening (e.g., Pepsi ‘Pepsi’ [pep.si] > [peb.si]/ [peβsi]), velarization (e.g., [pek.si]), and elision (e.g., [pe.si]). There is also weakening and deletion in intervocalic position (e.g., casado ‘married’ [ka.sa.do]>[ka.sao]). 97
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Various sociolinguistic projects have examined syllable-final plosive phenomena in Latin America. For example, Bongiovanni (2014) finds that younger and working-class speakers tend to favor elision in Caracas, Venezuela. With respect to velarization, Bongiovanni (2021) determines that this phenomenon is most common in the sequences /pt/ and /bt/ (e.g., apto ‘appropriate’ [apto] > [akto]) as well as /ps/ and /bs/ (e.g., absoluto ‘absolute’ > [aksoluto]) in Merida, Venezuela. While syllable-final velars and bilabials share a phonotactic sequence with [t] and [s], dentals do not, reinforcing the finding that velarization occurs more frequently with bilabials. There has been considerable sociolinguistic research regarding intervocalic deletion, especially focusing on the dental /d/. Long and Baldwin (2013), who analyze factors conditioning intervocalic deletion of the voiced plosives /b d g/ in Caracas, Venezuela, describe phonetic and social factors governing the phenomenon. Surrounding back vowels, unstressed syllables, and wordmedial positions favor /b/ deletion; increased lexical frequency, grammatical category, and type frequency (particularly the past participle marker -ado) favor /d/ deletion, while word-medial position and unstressed syllables favor /g/ deletion. Speakers from lower socioeconomic backgrounds as well as young speakers favor intervocalic /b/ deletion; no social factors are reported for /d/; and males and young speakers favor /g/ deletion. In a second study on Caracas focusing only on /d/ deletion, Díaz-Campos and Wheeler (2021) treat weakening as a continuous variable and describe low and mid vowels, unstressed syllables, and more frequent lexemes as favoring it. Outside of Venezuela, intervocalic weakening has been reported in several areas. Lipski (2011) observes that weakened variants are common in vernacular styles throughout Colombia, Chile, coastal Peru, and the Caribbean, while Díaz-Campos et al. (2018) have shown it to be prevalent in the speech of male speakers, as well as those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
Fricatives and affricates Syllable-final /s/ weakening has long been a focus of variationist analysis in the Spanish-speaking world. Examining the social stratification of variants in Cartagena, Lafford (1986) found that /s/ retention is frequent in formal registers and among speakers from upper socioeconomic backgrounds, while aspiration is treated as a neutral variant, and deletion is frequent in informal registers and among working-class individuals. Taking a usage-based perspective in Barranquilla, Colombia, Brown et al. (2021) find that lexical frequency helps describe deletion, as prevocalic word-final /s/ in higher-frequency and more cohesive bigrams are more prone to retention. Socially, elision is most common among speakers from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, elderly speakers, and men. One phenomenon unique to Latin America that concerns fricatives is zheismo, a process of sibilation where the Spanish palatal fricative is produced as either a voiced or voiceless palatoalveolar fricative, such as yo ‘I’ [ʝo]->[ʒo]/[ʃo]. Zheismo, typically associated with River Plate Spanish, has been described by Rohena‐Madrazo (2015) as shifting with relation to its social and linguistic conditioning over time. Examining Buenos Aires, this author determines that the voiceless variant is currently produced categorically by young speakers, while older speakers vary in their use of the voiced and voiceless variants, causing him to argue that the voiceless fricative is becoming the local norm. The Spanish affricate phoneme, voiceless palatal /tʃ/, has two common variants: a lenited fricative [ʃ] and a fronted pre-palatal affricate [ts]. In Mexico City, Serrano (2002) describes the fricative variant as a marker of Sonoran immigrant identity; first generation speakers preserve this regional feature, whereas second generation ones adopt the affricate variant favored in the city. In Chihuahua, Mexico, Méndez (2017) shows that men, speakers from lower socioeconomic 98
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backgrounds, and informal speech favor the fricative variant. Using a matched-guise methodology, Boomershine and Forgash (2021) analyze the three affricate variants [ʃ], [tʃ], and [ts] in Chilean Spanish. While the fricative variant receives lower evaluations, being labelled less educated, professional, and attractive, both affricate variants are rated more positively, suggesting that the fronted affricate [ts] has prestige in Chile. This is consistent with Flores’ (2016) study, in which she finds that young and middle-aged female radio personalities favor the fronted variant in conversations with other women. Díaz-Campos et al. (2023) et al. (2023), who describe normative and fricative variants in Venezuelan Spanish, find that variants with longer periods of frication are favored word-initially and before high and mid vowels, as well as by younger speakers and women in the more recent part of a diachronic dataset. They argue that this pattern could reflect a process of retiming indicating an ongoing change toward frication. Sibilant lenition and elision are common across Hispanic South America, a likely result of the historical influence of Andalusian Spanish. Although there is a regular tendency for weakened variants to be equated with working-class speech, these innovative productions seem to be on the rise in numerous varieties, hinting at an ongoing change from below in the region.
Morphosyntax Three morphosyntactic phenomena, characteristic of Latin American Spanish, are described in this section. They have been selected as they are prominent in varieties from the region, and provide promising focuses for future research in Spanish sociolinguistics.
Non-inversion of question word order Questions in Spanish are usually realized by inverting a subject and verb after an interrogative pronoun. In cases of non-inversion, the expected expression of ‘what is your name’: ¿Cómo te llamas tú? ‘How are you called (you)?’ becomes ¿Cómo tú te llamas? ‘How (you) are you called?’ Lipski (2005, p. 132) finds these constructions to be common in Caribbean Spanish. He argues that a source of origin could be migration from the Canary Islands, where the phenomenon is also documented. However, he also suggests that these constructions may stem from African influences, as the constructions are found in varieties of Spanish that have had considerable contact with African languages since colonial times. Unfortunately, studies of this phenomenon are yet relatively scarce in the Hispanic sociolinguistic literature. Additional research is merited to examine the linguistic and social factors involved in this pattern of variability, as well as to examine its proposed contact-based origins.
Se lo(s) A pattern of alternation exists between se lo/la ‘it/them’ and se los/las ‘it/them’ being used to represent plural indirect and singular direct objects. As an example, to respond to the question “When did you give us the books?” a speaker could use the expected production se lo regale ayer ‘I gave it to you all yesterday’ or the variable plural production se los regale ayer ‘I gave it to you all yesterday.’ In the first case, the invariable se represents the plural indirect object, and the singular lo represents the singular direct object, whereas the plural los is used in the second case to represent the plural indirect object. Schwenter and Hoff (2021) examine this phenomenon in Mexico City and Monterrey, finding that subject number, prepositional phrase, and referential distance are predictors of the expected 99
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se lo usage. Their analysis shows that dative referents more than three clauses away and absent prepositional phrases favor use of the se los variant, causing the authors to argue that the ‑s marks a less accessible dative referent when accessibility to the dative pronoun is uncertain. Although prior research had found social stratification for se los production, Schwenter and Hoff find it in vernacular registers across the two Mexican communities, especially in entrenched collocations (e.g., se los dije ‘I told it to them’).
Focalized ser The focalizing copula ser ‘to be’ consists of finite ser interpolated between another finite verb and its complements. For example, “Where I live is in Barranquilla” would have the expected production donde yo vivo es en Barranquilla and the innovative production yo vivo es en Barranquilla. This use of the copula highlights the immediately following constituent: in this case, ‘in Barranquilla.’ Kany (1969, p. 303) documents this structure in the Spanish of Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and in the Andean region of Venezuela, citing examples such as No, llegué fue cansado ‘No, I came (was) tired’ as a response to the question ¿Llegó usted con hambre? ‘Did you come hungry?’ to indicate that focalizing occurs in the context of a contrastive response. In data from Caracas, Bentivoglio and Sedano (2011) determine that the grammatical category of the postcopula clause and the tense of the pre-copula clause condition use. Post-copulas containing prepositional or adverbial phrases (e.g., Juan vino fue ayer ‘Juan came (was) yesterday’) and preceding verbs in any tense but the indicative present favor focalized ser. These authors also find that young speakers and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds favor the form. Research in other regions can help determine social conditioning factors for this phenomenon and determine if it has continued to hold social currency in Latin America.
Pragmatics The following sections focus on three phenomena in pragmatics that play integral roles in daily speech. Methodologies examining variation in sub-national groups are important, as tendencies differ at the level of individuals and communities of practice, allowing variability in production to become part of a complex web of social meanings integral to the development and performance of identity.
Forms of address South American Spanish includes a tripartite system of address forms, including the “familiar” vos (i.e., voseo), “standard/informal” tú (i.e., tuteo), and “formal” usted (i.e., ustedeo). While these terms often describe usage of the three forms, they conceal regional and social variation. For example, Uber (2011) describes the use of tú and usted in Bogotá, finding that while tú is used in semi-informal speech, usted is preferred at both ends of the spectrum, being seen as both a marker of formality and solidarity. In Uruguayan border Spanish, Carvalho (2010) describes regional use of tuteo reducing in the face of voseo spreading because of its prestige in Montevideo. The increased use of voseo among female and young speakers likely signals a prestige-oriented change in progress. In an analysis of all three forms of address in Cali, Colombia, Newall (2016) finds that tuteo and voseo are favored in informal contexts, although tuteo is mostly used by and towards women and voseo by and towards men. Speech from men to women, elderly speakers, unknown interlocutors, and formal speech tend to favor ustedeo.
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Voseo, unique to Latin America, has its historical roots in colonial Peninsular Spanish. According to Benavides (2003), voseo acquired negative connotations and began disappearing in Spain around the sixteenth century. The novel tú form was mostly imposed on regions with the highest level of politico-commercial exchange with Spain, such as Mexico, the Caribbean, and Peru. In the Americas, voseo continues to be used in areas with historically reduced contact with Spain, although verbal paradigms vary regionally. Díaz-Collazos (2015) examines diachronic development of voseo in Colombia, showing that vos is used in intimate communication among people of all social classes to address individuals of equal or inferior status, and it serves as a stereotype marker of groups with low socioeconomic and mixed racial backgrounds, as well as women, possibly signaling informality and asymmetrical status.
Quotatives Several strategies are employed to introduce direct speech in Spanish (e.g., Cameron, 1998 in Puerto Rico. Holguín Mendoza, 2015; Kern, 2017 in the U.S.). This includes (1) a structure using a verb and a quote (e.g., Yo le dije “Fue José” ‘I told him “It was Jose”’), (2) the pronominal formula y + subject + quote (e.g., Y yo “Fue José” ‘And I “It was Jose”’), (3) discourse markers like como or en plan (e.g., Y yo como/en plan “Fue José” ‘And I like “It was Jose”’), and (4) zero quotatives (e.g., “Fue José” ‘It was Jose’). Kern and Holguín Mendoza find that variant choice is constrained by the type of quoted material. For instance, in El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, Holguín Mendoza reports that the verb decir ‘to tell’ is the preferred form to quote direct speech. In Arizona Spanish, Kern finds that discourse markers like de que ‘that,’ como ‘like,’ and así ‘so’ are used more frequently to quote internal speech or thoughts. Quotatives also receive social conditioning, especially based on language contact. As Holguín Mendoza describes, speakers with more cultural exposure to English use more quotative discourse markers.
Reformulations Variationist pragmatics has also described variability of discourse markers for reformulations (San Martín Núñez, 2017). Some common examples include (1) o sea ‘I mean,’ (2) es decir ‘that is to say,’ and (3) digamos ‘let’s say.’ In Santiago de Chile, Rojas Inostroza et al. (2012) revealed social constraints in the system of reformulative discourse markers: young speakers use more reformulative markers and employ an innovative reformulation, onda (lit. ‘wave,’ colloq. ‘in a way’), nearly categorically. On the other hand, elderly speakers use more traditional forms such as es decir ‘that is to say’ and por ser ‘being,’ which may signal that there is an ongoing change in the reformulation system.
Sociolinguistics in society This section is concerned with several themes related to sociolinguistics in South America, including bilingualism and multilingualism, language policy and planning, and language ideology. These topics allow us to reflect on the complex socio-political interactions that exist among diverse groups in Latin America. There is both historical and ongoing contact between Indigenous, African, and European languages in the region that merit closer focus. We draw attention to research and policy decisions and suggest future steps based on existing theoretical frameworks.
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Bilingualism and multilingualism The social situation of bilingual speakers, as well as their linguistic contribution to Spanish varieties, has historically been neglected. The Sociolinguistic Atlas of Indigenous People in Latin America (Sichra, 2009) documents 665 communities and 557 Indigenous languages in the region. Some of the languages with the most substantial influences on Spanish include Nahuatl, Maya, Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní, and Mapuche. Recent research has begun to emphasize the importance of linguistic examinations of Indigenous communities, such as San Giacomo’s (2017) analysis of bilingual Nahuatl and Cuicateco communities in Mexico. Recent legislation has created provisions in several Latin American countries to address the needs of bilingual speakers. In Ecuador and Bolivia, Escobar (2011, p. 327) describes constitutional changes in the late 2000s giving Indigenous languages official status. While Spanish remains dominant in government, education, and mass media, advances in the last two decades have led to greater representation of Indigenous voices. Bilingual Quechua speakers have been elected to political positions and political organizations like the Confederation of Ecuadorean Indigenous Nationalities. Despite recent advances, discriminatory practices and intolerance toward Indigenous peoples continue, and the allocation of educational resources in rural areas is a major challenge. Afro-Spanish communities across Latin America have also begun to receive recognition for the historical contributions they have made to Spanish. In an overview of Palenquero, a creole language spoken in Palenque, Colombia, Schwegler (2011) describes grammatical features typical of Atlantic creoles and notes distinctive intonational patterns that differ from other Spanish varieties. Sessarego (2019) uses a linguistic, historical, and socio-cultural perspective to study the conditions for the formation of Chocó Spanish in Colombia. These investigations into Afro-Hispanic community norms help to document the formation of historical and modern varieties of Spanish, while also drawing attention to these underserved communities. This sample of contact situations meriting sociolinguistic analysis in South America is by no means exhaustive. There are many research opportunities in topics such as border sociolinguistics (e.g., Carvalho, 2014), heritage communities (e.g., Alarcón, 2010), and Indigenous languages in contact with Spanish (e.g., Rendón, 2008). These descriptions of linguistic, cultural, social, and dialectal contact are meant to provide insight into methodologies and locations worthy of future study, encouraging the documentation of underserved communities and demystification of group norms, fostering awareness of these topics.
Language policy and planning Issues of language policy in South America are complex and include social, political, and economic topics that range from national language statuses and languages of instruction in public education to the selection of legal and legislative languages used in a country. Policy and planning topics can also include document design, voting rights decisions, the language of public services, and on-the-job policies related to ethnic and gender discrimination. For example, Martínez (2014) shows the degree to which healthcare facilities on the U.S.-Mexico border lack detailed Spanish signage and written materials. This research helps bring awareness to the challenges facing underserved communities, and yet can often go unseen by policymakers. To better understand the struggles that minorities undergo, and to show how legislative decisions affect them, ethnographic work is vital. Sometimes invisible ethno-linguistic borders divide communities based on sociopolitical and ethnographic factors, leading to the stigmatization of language varieties and languages that hold less social prestige. Urciuoli (1995) argues for this 102
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ethnographic approach in contexts of codeswitching, which require not only micro-level (i.e., form and function) but also macro-level linguistic analysis (i.e., speakers’ social realities). Although linguistic inquiry is often concerned with borrowings or formal and functional details of speaker switching, it is equally essential to describe the social meaning of these phenomena in speech communities, as they have a real impact on social practices, context-dependent meaning, language standardization and social injustice. Studies in the fields of linguistic anthropology and the sociology of language have used linguistic ethnography and discourse analysis to understand how speakers both align with pre-existing notions of social categories and create new social meaning during interaction. In the central Bolivian context, Babel (2014) examines how Spanish contact features serve as social indices in a Spanish-Quechua community. Social meaning coded in contact features is shown not only to be dependent on the sociohistorical context of linguistic forms, but also on individual speakers’ history, social profile, and speech goals at the moment of interaction. Looking at Spanish contact with Quechua, Aymara, and Mochica, Salcedo Arnaiz (2021) describes historical and current linguistic power structures in Peru. While the imposition of Spanish was the final goal of the Spanish Crown, Peru was a territory with strong and numerous Indigenous groups. Quechua and Aymara became colonial linguas franca for the teaching of religion and indoctrination, and maintained a degree of national recognition. Despite this enhanced social position, there are still challenges for Peruvian bilingual populations, including persistent linguistic ideologies favoring Spanish and certain major Indigenous languages over others. In education, these subjective evaluations of linguistic prestige emerge through the adoption of prescriptive perspectives and policies that neglect minority groups. Across the Spanish speaking world, as Salcedo Arnaiz argues, collaborations between researchers and community members are crucial to identify problematic ideologies and facilitate social change.
Language ideology Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) describe language ideology as mediating between social structures and speech. Although definitions can vary by field and focus, issues of metalinguistics, community attitudes, prestige, standard languages, aesthetics, and hegemony all factor into the definition. Because of its intersectional nature linking linguistic and social theory, language ideology informs everything from bilingual policies and the selection of national languages to the types and varieties of language deemed acceptable in classrooms, legal proceedings, journalism, and free speech. In her discussion of language variation in the Americas, Niño-Murcia (2011) argues that individual identity stems in part from national and group identity, and in part from negotiations between individuals within groups. Standardized language serves as a means of identifying in- and out-groups, and establishing the power they possess. Spanish has been an integral part of identity in Latin America since its arrival during the colonial period. Based on these historical roots and differences, individual varieties often correspond in the minds of speakers with national identities. Colonial Spanish, a hegemonic power that imposed European linguistic and cultural norms on Indigenous and African languages, established itself in nations that were, in fact, pluri-national, multicultural, and multilingual. In recent decades and through the work of Indigenous groups, legislative accomplishments like the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 have formalized the multicultural reality of some Latin American countries. However, many individuals who present non-monolingual identities are still subject to negative social attitudes. Attitudes toward ethnic languages differ at a national scale, often related to sociohistorical relationships between Spanish and Indigenous languages. Niño-Murcia (2011) exemplifies these differences through the cases of Paraguay and Peru. In Paraguay, Guaraní and Spanish are both 103
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considered part of national identity, as bilingualism has been a Paraguayan norm since initial Spanish settlement. Historical conditions, including laissez-faire Spanish governance, resulted in rural settlements and isolation that facilitated the maintenance and social acceptance of bilingualism, even though Spanish continues to hold more prestige in higher public domains. Peru, in contrast, has long experienced social stratification between Spanish and Indigenous populations, reflecting a history of dominant colonial power. While Quechua and Aymara are major languages, their speakers have traditionally suffered discrimination and marginalization. The continued stigmatization of Indigenous languages in Latin America is a manifestation of the antiquated urge for assimilation, encouraging these speakers to abandon their culture and identity in favor of Spanish ones. Even within Indigenous communities, differences exist based on a complex web of social factors. Contrasting rural and urban spaces in Ecuador, Cole (2022) shows that Quechua speakers’ social values differ as they encounter urban tourists and move to urban spaces. Palatal distinction in Quechua Spanish between a lateral and fricative palatal variant (e.g., calle ‘street’ [caʎe], caye ‘he falls’ [caʝe]) is abandoned among speakers with greater Spanish and urban contact, replaced instead with the prestigious Spanish norm that removes distinction, using only the lateral fricative (e.g., calle/caye ‘street/he falls’ [caʝe]). More research into language ideology and identity construction is needed throughout Latin America. Few studies have examined the role of Indigenous languages, extended language contact, and multilingualism in the shaping of individual identity in this region. Recent changes in many South American judicial systems may have provided new ways to prioritize ethnic languages in education and governance. However, research into the impact of these changes on students, individual speakers, communities of practice, and even national groups are scarce, warranting further analysis.
Final remarks This chapter has presented an overview of some of the most recent variationist research in South America at different levels of linguistic analysis, representing a long tradition of dialectological and sociolinguistic inquiry in Hispanic Linguistics. In fact, the field has thrived since the development of the first language corpora in the early 1970s. One recent major endeavor that deserves mention, the Project for the Study of Spanish Sociolinguistics in Spain and America (PRESEEA, 2014), compiles over forty-five corpora from cities across the Spanish-speaking world. These ever-increasing resources, which include synchronic and diachronic data, show that the future is bright for continued research. Additionally, we discussed the sociolinguistics of society, describing aspects of multilingualism, policy, and ideology. There has been an admirable trend in sociolinguistic research within recent decades to use approaches that encourage the representation of minority and underserved communities, and allow us to better understand individual choices in the formation of identity. There are numerous opportunities for exciting research, as Latin America is experiencing radical changes, including legal provisions for ethnic groups, regime changes, and social developments that promise to reshape language use and national identity. While regional varieties have historically been separated by national borders, new economic alliances such as MERCOSUR promise to facilitate the exchange of Portuguese and Spanish to countries along the Brazilian border. Intense migration, such as the exodus of more than six million citizens from the crisis in Venezuela, has led to the diffusion of linguistic variation across the continent. At the same time, there has been an increased influx of bilingual speakers moving into urban areas. All of this movement of peoples is redefining speech communities and providing sociolinguistic innovations for future generations to discover in the study of multicultural Hispanic South America. 104
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9 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN THE CARIBBEAN Joseph T. Farquharson and Bettina Migge
Introduction The Caribbean is a small but heterogeneous linguistic space. Geographically speaking, it only refers to the islands in the Caribbean Sea, including several island chains such as the Greater and the Lesser Antilles. From a sociocultural and linguistic perspective, it also includes Central American countries such as Panama and Belize and the Guiana region in South America, including French Guiana, Suriname and Guyana, given important similarities. The current heterogeneity emerged through colonisation which anchored European languages, most notably, Dutch, English, French and Spanish in the region which now function as official languages. Colonisation also led to the emergence of Creoles and new varieties of European and Asian languages such as Sranami in Suriname. First Nation languages were mostly displaced but Garifuna in Belize is an example of a language that emerged due to European and Native American contact. First Nation languages survive in the Guiana region and Central America. Networks among countries colonised by the same European nation and with the colonising nation, or related nations such as the United States of America and Canada, in the case of English-official nations, remain strong, despite interactions across colonial divides gradually improving. There is also migration between countries. Table 9.1 provides an overview of the countries in the region. Table 9.1 shows that the countries differ significantly in terms of geography, population size and their ethnic and linguistic makeup. Some island nations mainly consist of African-descended people who speak predominantly a local Creole that is historically related to the official language (e.g., Antigua). At the other end of the spectrum, there are countries that feature a variety of ethnic groups, several related and unrelated Creole languages, one or more European, Asiatic and First Nation languages. Investigation of variation in English-official Caribbean nations (Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago) was at the forefront of early quantitative sociolinguistic research. Recent research treats a wider range of issues such as language and law, language and education and language policy and issues of identity construction and language attitudes. More interest in applied work focusing on raising the profile of Creoles and promoting their active use is also visible. There is also research on a wider range of territories including Grenada, St Vincent, Bequia, Dominica, St Lucia and Frenchofficial islands. While early studies focused almost exclusively on Creoles, more recent studies pay attention to the European, Asian and Native American languages (Carlin et al., 2014; Yakpo & DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-11 108
Sociolinguistics in the Caribbean Table 9.1 Overview of demographic and linguistic information of ‘Caribbean’ countries Country
Population Official Languages used language
Anguilla 14,731 English Antigua and Barbuda 97,928 English Aruba 106,766 Dutch Bahamas 393,248 English Barbados 287,371 English Bay Islands, Honduras 49,151 Spanish Belize 397,621 English Bermuda 63,903 English Cancun 400,000 Spanish Cayman Islands 65,720 English Cuba 11,326,616 Spanish Curacao 155,014 Dutch Dominica 71,991 English Dominican Republic 10,847,904 Spanish French Guiana 280 000 French
Grenada Guadeloupe Guyana
112,519 English 384 239 French 786,559 English
Haiti Isla Cozumel Isla de Margarita Jamaica
11,402,533 50,000 350,000 2,961,161
Martinique Nicaragua Panama St Kitts & Nevis St Lucia St Martin
364 508 6,525,000 4,314,000 53,000 181,889 73,666
St Vincent & the Grenadine Suriname
Virgin Islands British Spanish US St Kitts & Nevis Trinidad and Tobago
French Spanish Spanish English
English, Anguillian Creole English, Antiguan Creole Papiamentu, Dutch, English, Spanish English, Bahamian Creole English, Barbadian Creole Spanish, English, Creole, Amerindian languages English, Spanish, Mayan, Garifuna, Belizean Creole English, Portuguese Spanish, English English, Cayman Creole Spanish Papiamentu, Spanish, Dutch English, Kwéyòl, Kokoy Spanish, Haitian Creole, some English French Guianese Creole, Haitian Creole, Antilliean Creoles, Businenge(e) Tongo (Aluku, Ndyuka, Pamaka), Saamaka, Sranan Tongo, Guyanese Creole, Hmong, varieties of Chinese, French, Kali’na, Wayana, Teko, Palikur, Lokono, French English, Grenadian French Creole French, Guadeloupean Creole Creolese (Guyanese Creole), English, Arawak, Akawaio, Waiwai, Wapishana, Guyanese Hindustani, French, Haitian Creole Spanish Spanish English, Jamaican Creole, Jamaican Sign Language, Konchri Sign French, Matinican Creole Spanish, English, Kriol, Miskito, Suma, Rama Panama Creole, Spanish, Ngäbes, Embera, Kuna Saint Kitts Creole, English St Lucian Creole (Kwéyole), English Dutch, French, Creole
French Spanish Spanish English English Dutch, French 110,211 English Vincentian Creole, English
580 000 Dutch
147,778 English 30,237 11,119 87,146 53,000 English 1,367,558 English
Sranan Tongo, Sranami, Javanese, Eastern Maroon Creoles (Aluku, Ndyuka, Pamaka, Kwinti), Western Maroon Creoles (Matawai, Saamaka), Karinya, Arawak, Trio, English, Guyanese Creole, Dutch Virgin Island Creole, Spanish, English
Saint Kitts Creole, English English, Trinidadian Creole, Tobagonian Creole, Trinidadian Patois, Trinidad and Tobago Sign Language
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Muysken, 2017) and language practices in diaspora communities (Hinrichs, 2011; Lacoste, 2021; Valentin-Marquez & Gonzalez-Rivera, 2021) and in virtual contexts.
Variationist studies Quantitative sociolinguistic research, including work applying implicational scaling methods, was prominent between the 1970s and 1990s and showed that Creoles are linguistically independent from their European lexifiers and that the variation is socially conditioned. More recent work has focused on the social meanings of variation. Sidnell (1999) showed that use of pronominal variants in Guyana is conditioned by local conceptualisations of gendered behaviour. Deuber (2014), examining language practices of educated Trinidadians and Jamaicans across different text types using quantitative and qualitative approaches, discovered that variation is stylistically motivated and relates to processes of identity construction. Style is chiefly implemented via the lexical and morphosyntactic impact of the Creole on English. Jones’ (2022) work on language use in Jamaican popular music showed that the choice between English and Jamaican Creole can be predicted by a combination of genre, delivery style, the decade in which the song is released, and the theme. Westphal (2017), investigating the language use of newscasters and talk show hosts and listeners’ attitudes to their speech, showed that practices are heterogeneous, promoting standardised norms while at the same time also challenging their assumed monolithic character since there is significant interaction between Creole and local and external varieties of English. Migge (2017), exploring several morphosyntactic variables in data from two time periods, concluded that contact-induced change from Ndyuka and Sranan Tongo appear to be impacting Matawai. There has also been an increase in phonology and socio-phonetics research. Gooden (2014) explored intonational features of Creoles and their social correlates while Lacoste (2012) discussed children’s patterns of phonological and phonetic variation in rural Jamaica, their social conditioning and how they impact the acquisition of variation. Following Irvine’s (2004, 2008) seminal publication of sound variation in Jamaican English, publications have specifically investigated phonological variation in Caribbean Englishes. Leung (2013), investigating several monophthongal mergers in Trinidadian English concluded that they are not a simple instance of contact-induced language change but show social and linguistic complexity. Rosenfelder (2009) examined three variables in the English of Jamaican speakers recorded for the ICE Jamaica corpus. The variables continue to show significant social and contextually based variation which is distinct from that found in UK English. Variation is mostly between UK and Creole rather than US variants and conditioned by formality. Westphal (2022) examined variation between English and Creole variants in the speech of Trinidadian professionals showing that while some Creole variants are variably integrated into English speech, others are avoided. This concurs with Irvine-Sobers (2018) who separated phonological variants into load-bearing and non-load-bearing ones. Finally, Meer (2020) shows that automatic aligners for studying vowel variation in Trinidadian English originally developed for US English provide good results. Recent research has emphasised the meaning-making potential of variation (Eckert, 2018). Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, a cornerstone of Third Wave sociolinguistics (Eckert, 2012), studies have demonstrated the role of social and interactional identities in variation and their role in the emergence of new speech styles. Deuber (2011, 2014) found that stylistic variation in her Jamaican corpus concurred with previous work on the post-creole continuum which classified stylistic shifts as operating along casual – formal, Creole – English dimensions, but cautioned that a mere look at language use patterns and situational contexts is unlikely to properly account for that complexity. Migge (2021) discussed changing patterns of variation in 110
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Maroon speech and how they are leading to class-based styles and an expansion of stylistic repertoires. Migge and Léglise (2015) and Léglise and Migge (2021) also examined the impact of local affordances and national language ideologies on language practices of Maroons in Suriname and French Guiana showing that the impact is clearly visible in people’s discourses about languages and naming practices, but less so in language use due to strong cross-regional networks. There is little research into gender, sexuality, race (Blake, 1996) and social class (Rickford, 1991). Mühleisen and Walicek (2009) features several qualitative studies on language and gender demonstrating that gender requires much more in-depth attention as gendered differences are ubiquitous but differ in part from western ones; certain groups of men rather than women show innovative patterns. Sidnell’s (1999, 2000, 2003) work on Guyana shows that such research requires careful ethnographic and textual investigation. Dawkins’ (2013) investigation of gender-based audience design in Jamaican dancehall songs showed that in choruses, male and female deejays (i.e. singers) produced a higher frequency of open and back vowels in lyrics directed at men and a similar distribution of close front and close-mid front vowels in lyrics directed at women. There is also rising interest in pragmatic variation. Works have investigated language use and individual agency in popular music (Farquharson, 2005; Jones, 2019; Managan, 2021), the broadcasting sector (Garrett, 2000; Migge, 2011), administrative writing (Oenbring & Klumm, 2022), and online (Moll, 2015; Migge, 2020a), and Mühleisen (2022b) examines the development of various text types. Other works have explored the interactional functions of linguistic features such as second person plural pronouns (Mühleisen, 2011), discourse markers (Migge, 2020b) and strategies of self-presentation in dating ads (Mühleisen, 2016). These works highlight the rich stylistic practices and the effects of social change. Further research is urgently needed to gain deeper insights into Caribbean discourse practices.
Language attitudes, ideologies and standards Early research measured how the Creole fares in relation to the politically dominant ex-colonial language and conceptualised attitudes as fixed, assessing them using questionnaire surveys that assess people’s views about their own or another speaker’s social properties (friendliness, professionalism, beauty etc.) and orientation to the language. Recent studies focus on European languages, attesting growing awareness of endonormative varieties (Deuber, 2013). Most studies deal with English but there is now also research on Dutch in Suriname (Ghyselen et al., 2022). Investigation of attitudes in news broadcasting and education (Deuber & Leung, 2013; Canan Hänsel et al., 2022) showed that Trinidadians favoured local accents little influenced by Creole and that there were contextual differences as Grenadians displayed more openness to endonormative varieties in newscasting than in education. There is also research on US influences, smaller countries (Hackert, 2016; Belgrave, 2008) and analysis of views in newspaper and online commentary sections (Mühleisen, 2022a). Language ideology research which emphasises the emergent and variable nature of beliefs and qualitative analyses has demonstrated the interactionally situated and non-binary nature of language beliefs and their role in shaping practices (Migge & Léglise, 2013; Léglise & Migge, 2015; Schneider, 2021). Changes in beliefs are also evident in commercialisation, for example, the increasing use of Creoles in advertising and other domains ripe for monetisation (Farquharson, 2015; Mair et al., 2015). Creole linguistic resources may have different indexicalities linked to a variety of cultural entities such as external ties, normative or colonial standards and resistance to them (Schneider, 2021). 111
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Except for countries with pre-Columbian languages (Belize, Guyana, Suriname), and those where Creoles are not related to the European language (e.g., Dominica, St. Lucia), most areas are ideologically bi-dialectal. Creoles are seen as a substandard versions of the (standard) variety. This disenfranchises especially monolingual speakers of Creoles (Walters, 2016, 2017), and ignores other languages such as Sign Languages and heritage languages. The Jamaican constitution enshrines the right to an interpreter for anyone charged with an offence who does not speak English. However, monolingual or Creole-dominant bilinguals often do not access this right because the Creole is not treated as a separate language. This perspective also creates issues in courtrooms where witnesses and the functionaries of the court often interact with each other in separate codes. Judges function not only as co-creators of stories, but also as unofficial translators/interpreters as they sum up in English, testimonies delivered in Creole (Forrester, 2012, 2014). The impact on the outcome of trials has not been fully explored, but Evans’ (2021) experimental study of the spontaneous translation by rural St Lucian police officers of the pre-trial right to silence into Kwéyòl, showed a high level of variability, bringing into question procedural fairness. Language standards and standardisation are persistent sources of debate in academic and non-academic spheres, especially with regard to how to treat Caribbean varieties of European languages (Devonish & Thomas, 2012). The usual practice within and without academia, is to present the linguistic situation as dichotomous having Standard English and varieties of Creole, with little or no recognition of any (colloquial) European languages that is not Creole. Through the endonormative approaches of the past three decades (Deuber, 2014; Mair, 2002; Irvine-Sobers, 2018), there is growing recognition that Caribbean nations have their own standards. While Allsopp’s (1996) pioneering dictionary attempted to define a Caribbean Standard English, a more fragmentary approach that recognises each nation state as having its own standard is currently favoured, e.g., Standard Belizean English: Deuber (2014) on Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, Eberle (2021) on Bermudian English, Canan Hänsel et al. (2022.) on Grenadian English, Hackert et al. (2020) on Bahamian English, Mair (2002), Irvine-Sobers (2018) on Jamaican English, Meer et al. (2019), Meer and Fuchs (2021) on Trinidad and Tobago English. The shift from a Caribbean standard to national standards has shed light on many old and new developments in each nation but tends to miss common patterns of change in Caribbean Englishes, e.g., the use of would have for simple past. There is need for investigating the effects of Americanisation bearing in mind the functional and contextual nuancing called for in Hackert (2015). There is work on endonormative standards of Caribbean and Latin American varieties of Spanish (Herrera Morena et al., 2016; Hollingsworth, 1978; Lipski, 1997), but work on the French-official Caribbean is slow in coming (cf. Jeannot-Fourcaud, 2017), no doubt because of their closer political ties to France. Discussions on and decisions about language in education are often only indirectly influenced by the available scientific knowledge, being largely based on the personal beliefs, professional background and aspirations of serving policymakers, which results in language education policy evolving in fits and starts (McLean-Francis, 2021). Devonish (2007, pp. 227–239) and the chapters in Migge et al. (2010) provide overviews of some recent efforts and research in this area.
Multilingualism, diglossia and code-switching Although most Caribbean societies are bi-/multilingual at one or several scales (individual, social, national), their common designations as Dutch-, English-, French-, or Spanish-speaking make the widely spoken non-official languages invisible. This also masks complex sociolinguistic situations such as in Cuba and the Dominican Republic where, due to migration, Haitian has become a significant language. Official state bilingualism may hide predominant monolingualism as in 112
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Puerto Rico where although Spanish and English have been co-official for over a century, full bilingualism is low. Codeswitching often does not signal a non-Puerto Rican identity but an ongoing negotiation of Puerto Rican-ness (Pérez Casas, 2008). Ferguson’s application of diglossia to Haiti has been seriously questioned since the 1980s (Dejean, 1983) and has also been rejected for the English-official territories by Devonish (2003) who proposed the concept of ‘conquest diglossia’ to capture how the history of conquest and domination has influenced post-colonial language ideologies long after independence. The typical configuration is that a small segment of the population is monolingual in the Creole, an even smaller number is monolingual in the European language, and a large segment is bilingual. The latter can be further subdivided into Creole-dominant, English-dominant and balanced bilinguals. Outside of Suriname (Yakpo & Muysken, 2017), there is a dearth of research on contexts where indigenous languages are in long term contact with one or more Creoles and/or one or more European languages as in Belize, Costa Rica and Guyana or between the former and (later) immigrant languages. There is some work on situations where the Creole coexists with a European language that is not its lexifier, e.g., in Belize where students often have negative attitudes to Spanish, and teachers of Spanish use codeswitching between Spanish, English and Belizean Kriol as a pedagogical tool (Balam & de Prada Pérez, 2017). This seems to be in keeping with observations in other territories where codeswitching is regular and meaningful and needs to be considered as a crucial element in the sociolinguistic characterisation (Mellom, 2006). Balam’s (2015) work also studied the crossgenerational similarities and differences in the Spanish of multilingual people in Northern Belize. He found that the Spanish of the younger generation exhibits an expansion in the number and types of verbs that occur in the ‘hacer + V’ construction. English-dominant children in Dominica, as in many other Caribbean nations, codeswitch between English and Creole while at play, in ways that provide insights on their socialisation and their understanding of who uses what code to whom for what purpose (Paugh, 2005). Many Creoles have also made inroads into different public domains. For example, Jamaican Creole has been gaining more overt prestige, and has seen an uptick in use in advertisements, and in naming products, brands and businesses (Farquharson, 2005). There is also a predominance of certain Creoles in popular music such as Trinidadian English Creole in Trinidadian soca, Jamaican Creole in dancehall music (Farquharson, 2017), or the use of Jamaican Creole by Trinidadian singers in the hybrid genre ragga soca (Leung, 2009). Equally important are the choices made by members of the various deaf communities between Village Sign Languages, e.g., Koncrhi Sain in Jamaica (Cumberbatch, 2012, 2015), Orocovis Sign Language in Puerto Rico (Benedicto et al., 2021), national Sign Languages (e.g., Trinidad and Tobago Sign Language), and how these interact with globally visible external varieties such as American Sign Language (Braithwaite, 2018).
Language activism and language planning Much of the language activism has focused on Creoles, even in territories with pre-Columbian languages. This is understandable, given that Creoles tend to be linguae francae, cutting across ethnic and socio-economic divides. In the French-official territories that are overseas regions of France (e.g., Guadeloupe, Martinique), French-related Creoles are officially recognised as regional languages while others with large speaker groups such as Haitian Creole are not accorded any status. Other widely spoken Creole languages such as the English-lexified Creoles Aluku, Ndyuka, Pamaka and Saamaka in French Guiana are officially recognised as Langue de France together with First Nation languages due to their long history in the region but for socio-political reasons 113
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their status limps behind that of French Guianese Creole. The practical benefits of official recognition are emerging slowly. For example, bilingual education was only set up in 2008 for French Guianese Creole and for the English-related Creoles and other languages in 2018. Public debates on language remain fierce in contexts where the Creole coexists with its main lexifier and is constantly compared to it. For this reason, Creoles continue to be given little space in educational institutions despite positive results from experimental projects (Carpenter & Devonish, 2010). Language activism is carried on by few individuals (chiefly academics and/or languageinterested locals and outsiders) and a growing number of language planning agencies such as the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) at The University of the West Indies, Mona, the Guyana Languages Unit (GLU) at the University of Guyana, and the UWI-based International Centre for Caribbean Language Research (ICCLR), an umbrella organisation that coordinates and supports region-wide language planning work. In 2011, ICCLR hosted the Conference on Language Policy in the Caribbean which led to the Charter on Language Policy and Language Rights in the Creolespeaking Caribbean which speaks to the language rights Caribbean citizens should be accorded in public administration, formal education, informal education and culture. Activities focus on instrumentalising Creoles and localised varieties of European languages in education and have spurred the development of orthographic conventions, new vocabulary, etc for many Creoles. Over the past two decades, more Caribbean nationals have come into contact with linguistics through the Use of English/Academic Writing (or Academic Literacies) courses at the tertiary level (Milson-Whyte, 2008), linguistics programmes (Kouwenberg et al., 2011), and the introduction of Communication Studies as a Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exam (CAPE) subject at the upper secondary school level. The CAPE syllabus contains a module focusing on language and community and contrasts structures of Creoles and English. The impact of these developments has not yet been investigated. While the official languages continue to dominate traditional media, Creoles and indigenous languages have been benefitting from the digital revolution and the democratisation of publishing outlets. Caribbean people who are first language speakers of Caribbean Creoles or indigenous languages now use social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to talk about and promote their own languages, but do not always adopt the writing conventions devised by academics. In Suriname there has been a significant rise in grassroots news and discussion broadcasts delivered by speakers of Creoles for speakers of Creoles that are widely disseminated in Suriname and beyond by WhatsApp groups (Migge, 2020a) and people form informal discussion groups using voice messages.
Corpus linguistics and computer-mediated communication (CMC) Linguistics in the Caribbean has been slow in entering the big data era (Rickford, 2022). There are few large corpora initiated or owned by scholars from/in the region. There are a few massive global corpora that include Caribbean varieties of Spanish such as the CORPES corpus (Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI) compiled by the Real Academia Española, and the Corpus del Español (compiled at BYU). These exist alongside smaller ones dedicated to Caribbean varieties such as the CallFriend Caribbean Spanish corpus which comprises 30-minute unscripted telephone conversations from all Spanish-official Caribbean territories, and the Fisher Spanish Speech which covers roughly the same geographical areas as CallFriend but is larger. Up to 2018, roughly 7.43% of the tokens in the Corpus of Contemporary Dutch were Caribbean: Antillian Dutch (3.27%) and Surinamese Dutch (4.16%) (Depoorter et al., 2018).1 There are very few openly accessible corpora for the Caribbean context. In the International Corpus of English (ICE) suite of sub-corpora, there is ICE Jamaica and ICE Trinidad and Tobago. 114
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Their aim is to provide a representative overview of the use of (standard?) English used in these contexts to facilitate comparative analysis (Greenbaum, 1996). They consist of spoken and written language across a variety of contexts, but only the transcripts are publicly available (Deuber, 2010). The two corpora serve to investigate sociolinguistic issues such as the deployment of linguistic styles among educated community members (e.g., Deuber, 2011, 2014; Rosenfelder, 2009). There are also linguistic atlases that document regional variation in the French Antilles (https://journals.openedition.org/lbl/1551) and within Haiti (https://lt2d.cyu.fr/version-francaise/ ressources/atlas-linguistique-dhaiti). Linguistics work on Caribbean Creoles is based on small privately owned corpora comprising fieldwork data or a few available texts. They are used for structural descriptions with only a small number (e.g., Patrick, 1999) serving as the basis of sociolinguistic descriptions and theorising. Publicly available corpora tend to be more modest such as the Corpus of Northern Haitian Creole (cf. Valdman et al., 2015). Publicly available corpora include Creoles, sometimes incidentally (e.g., ICE T&T, ICE Jamaica), or as a deliberate feature of the varilingual nature of the texts, e.g., the Corpus of Cyber-Jamaican (Moll, 2015). The slow progress in corpus studies is certainly due to the fact that Creoles and indigenous languages tend to be low-/under-resourced languages, and corpus construction is a labour- and capital-intensive venture; however, the increasing use of these languages on the internet is producing a growing body of publicly available data for the study of these languages in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Hinrichs (2006) used a corpus of emails written by Jamaicans to investigate codeswitching and discovered that English is the baseline code even in email messages between friends, a pattern that runs counter to what takes place in speech. Jamaican Creole and codeswitching itself are used for a variety of semiotic and identitysignalling functions. Moll (2015), using a corpus compiled from an internet forum used by Jamaicans at home and in the diaspora, argues that the forum is a community of practice using a digital ethnolinguistic repertoire that is based on sociolinguistic styling and the (anti-)standardisation of spelling norms. In addition to the corpora compiled by scholars, fairly new social media platforms such as YouTube also provide linguists with the opportunity to observe Caribbean languages in multimodal contexts. Migge (2020a), studying practices on a YouTube channel, argued that the Eastern Maroon Creole exhibits resilience in the face of globalisation, an expansion in functions and styles, while at the same time serving as a unifying tool for a community that is geographically dispersed. The comments section can be equally enlightening as the linguistic practices in comments sometimes do not mirror those in the associated video/post. Corpora CallFriend https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC96S58 Corpus of Northern Haitian Creole https://archive.org/details/interview-8-ujf-107-a-ujm-107-a Fisher Spanish Speech https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2010S01
Note 1 Caribbean varieties of French may be included in large French corpora such as the Corpus de référence du français contemporain (CRFC, cf. Siepmann et al., 2017). There exists a small corpus of the L2 production of Jamaican students learning French (Peters, 2006).
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Joseph T. Farquharson and Bettina Migge Léglise, I., & Migge, B. (2021). Language and identity construction on the French Guiana-Suriname border. Journal of Multilingualism, 18(1), 90–104. Leung, G. A. E. (2009). Negotiation of Trinidadian identity in ragga soca music. World Englishes, 28(4), 509–531. Leung, G. A. E. (2013). A synchronic sociophonetic study of monophthongs in Trinidadian English [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Freiburg University]. Lipski, J. M. (1997). En busca de las normas fonéticas del español. In M. C. Colombi & F. X. Alarconi (Eds.), La enseñanza del español a hispanohablantes: Praxis y teoría (pp. 121–132). Houghton Mifflin. Mair, C. (2002). Creolisms in an emerging standard: Written English in Jamaica. English World-Wide, 23(1), 31–58. Mair, C., Mühleisen, S., & Pirker, E. U. (2015). Selling the Caribbean: An introduction. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 63(2), 139–156. Managan, K. (2021). Creole arts and music. In U. Ansaldo & M. Meyerhoff (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Pidgin and Creole languages. Routledge. McLean-Francis, N. J. (2021). Ring Road: Evolving currents and models in official language education policy in Jamaica, 1947–2018 [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of the West Indies, Mona]. Meer, P. (2020). Automatic alignment for New Englishes: Applying state-of-the-art aligners to Trinidadian English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(4), 2283–2294. Meer, P., & Fuchs, R. (2021). The Trini sing-song: Sociophonetic variation in Trinidadian English prosody and differences to other varieties. Language and Speech, 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830921998404 Meer, P., Westphal, M., Hänsel, E. C., & Deuber, D. (2019). Trinidadian secondary school students’ attitudes toward accents of Standard English. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 34(1), 83–125. Mellom, P. J. (2006). Code-switching at a bilingual school in Costa Rica: Identity, intertextuality and new portraits of competence [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia]. Migge, B. (2011). Negotiating social identities on an Eastern Maroon radio show. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(6), 1495–1511. Migge, B. (2017). Putting Matawai on the Surinamese Linguistic Map. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 30(2), 232–262. Migge, B. (2020a). Mediating Creoles: Language practices on a YouTube show. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 35(2), 381–404. Migge, B. (2020b). Broadening creole studies: From grammar towards discourse. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 35(1), 162–179. Migge, B. (2021). Language styles, styling and language change in Creole communities. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, 36(1), 396–423. Migge, B., & Léglise, I. (2013). Exploring language in a multilingual context: Variation, interaction and ideology in language documentation. Cambridge University Press. Migge, B., & Léglise, I. (2015). Assessing the sociolinguistic situation of the Maroon Creoles. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 30(1), 63–115. Migge, B., Léglise, I., & Bartens, A. (Eds.). (2010). Creoles in education: An appraisal of current programs and projects. John Benjamins. Milson-Whyte, V. (2008). A history of writing instruction for Jamaican university students: A case for moving beyond the rhetoric of transparent disciplinarity at the University of the West Indies, Mona [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Arizona]. Moll, A. (2015). Jamaican Creole Goes Web: Sociolinguistic styling and authenticity in a digital ‘Yaad’. John Benjamins. Mühleisen, S. (2011). Forms of address and ambiguity in Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles: Strategic interactions in a postcolonial language setting. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(6), 1460–1471. Mühleisen, S. (2016). “More about me”: Self-presentation and narrative strategies in Caribbean Online Dating Ads. Open Linguistics, 2(1), 437–449. Mühleisen, S. (2022a). Talking about Creole: Language attitudes and public discourse in the Caribbean. In S. Gooden & B. Migge (Eds.), Sociolinguistics, social aspects and linguistics of language contacts. Language Science Press. Mühleisen, S. (2022b). Genre in world Englishes. Case studies from the Caribbean. John Benjamins. Mühleisen, S., & Walicek, D. E. (2009). Language and gender in the Caribbean: An overview. Sargasso, 2008/09(1). Oenbring, R., & Klumm, M. (2022). The trappings of order: Linguistic features of Anglophone Caribbean administrative writing. English World-Wide, 43(1), 66–95.
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Sociolinguistics in the Caribbean Patrick, P. L. (1999). Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the mesolect. John Benjamins. Paugh, A. L. (2005). Multilingual play: Children’s code-switching, role play, and agency in Dominica, West Indies. Language in Society, 34(1), 63–86. Pérez Casas, M. (2008). Codeswitching and identity among island Puerto Rican bilinguals [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Georgetown University]. Peters, H. (2006). Development of a longitudinal oral interlanguage corpus of Jamaican learners of French. Caribbean Journal of Education, 27, 201–222. Rickford, J. R. (1991). Sociolinguistic variation in Cane Walk: A quantitative case study. In J. Cheshire (Ed.), English around the world: Sociolinguistic perspectives (pp. 609–616). Cambridge University Press. Rickford, J. R. (2022). The value of online corpora for the analysis of variation and change in the Caribbean. In S. Gooden & B. Migge (Eds.), Sociolinguistics, social aspects and linguistics of language contacts. Language Science Press. Rosenfelder, I. (2009). Sociophonetic variation in educated Jamaican English: An analysis of the spoken component of the ICE-Jamaica [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Freiburg University]. Retrieved March 10, 2020, from https://freidok.uni-freiburg.de/data/9336 Schneider, B. (2021). Creole prestige beyond modernism and methodological nationalism: Multiplex patterns, simultaneity and non-closure in the sociolinguistic economy of a Belizean village. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 36(1), 12–45. Sidnell, J. (1999). Gender and pronominal variation in an Indo-Guyanese Creole speaking community. Language in Society, 28(3), 367–399. Sidnell, J. (2000). Primus inter pares: Story-telling and male peer groups in an Indo-Guyanese rum shop. American Ethnologist, 27(1), 72–99. Sidnell, J. (2003). Constructing and managing male exclusivity in talk-in-interaction. In J. Holmes & M. Meyerhoff (Eds.), Handbook of language and gender (pp. 327–352). Blackwell. Siepmann, D., Bürgel, C., & Diwersy, S. (2017). The Corpus de référence du français contemporain (CRFC) as the first genre-diverse mega-corpus of French. International Journal of Lexicography, 30(1), 63–84. Valdman, A., Villeneuve, A.-J., & Siegel, J. F. (2015). On the influence of the standard norm of Haitian Creole on the Cap Haïtien dialect Evidence from sociolinguistic variation in the third person singular pronoun. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 30(1), 1–43. Valentin-Marquez, W., & Gonzalez-Rivera, M. (Eds.). (2021). Dialects from tropical islands: Caribbean Spanish in the United States. Routledge. Walters, K. (2016). Andastan mi no man: Removing language barriers in Jamaica’s legal system. Sargasso: Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, & Culture, 2, 33–42. Walters, K. (2017). Language teacher or service representatives? The corrective conversational practices of customer service representatives in Jamaica’s Public Entities. The Caribbean Journal of Education (Special Edition), 38(2), 1–17. Westphal, M. (2017). Language variation on Jamaican radio. John Benjamins. Westphal, M. (2022). Phonetic variation in standard English by Trinidadian professionals. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 37(2). Yakpo, K., & Muysken, P. (Eds.) (2017). Boundaries and bridges: Language contact in multilingual ecologies. de Gruyter.
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10 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE ATLANTIC ENGLISHES Rosemary Hall, Hannah Hedegard, Andrea Sudbury, Nicole Holliday, Daniel Schreier and David Britain
In this chapter we present the sociolinguistic situation in four insular Atlantic (non-Caribbean) varieties of English, one in the Northern Hemisphere (Bermuda – written by Holliday and Hall), and three in the south (St Helena, Tristan da Cunha, both written by Schreier, and the Falkland Islands, written by David Britain, Hannah Hedegard and Andrea Sudbury).
English in Bermuda Introduction Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory (BOT) located in the North Atlantic Ocean, approximately 1000 kilometres from the North American coastline and 1000 kilometres north of the Bahamas. Significantly, it was uninhabited when it was discovered in the early 1500s by Portuguese explorer Juan de Bermudez (Zuill, 1983), and remained so until British settlement in 1612 following the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture. As the oldest continuously inhabited BOT, Bermuda represents one of the very first places, second only to Jamestown, Virginia, where English was spoken outside the British Isles. Despite this long history and its rich opportunities for dialect study, Bermudian English (BerE) has until recently been ‘one of the most severely under-researched varieties of English’ (Cutler et al., 2006, p. 2066). In the last decade, however, BerE has received more attention from scholars. In this section, we will outline the work to date on BerE, which falls into two main categories: defining and describing the variety and investigating stylistic variation and social meaning in Bermuda. While Bermuda’s dominant language is English, it must be noted that it is in fact a multilingual context. Bermuda has a Portuguese community, who make up an estimated 25% of the population and are descended from (primarily Azorean) Portuguese immigrants arriving on the islands from the 1840s onwards. There have been recent efforts by local cultural organizations to encourage young Bermudians to learn Portuguese. We are not aware of any verifiable data on the number of Portuguese speakers in the country, and the status of the language in Bermuda is in urgent need of research.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-12 120
The sociolinguistics of the Atlantic Englishes
Defining and describing Bermudian English Bermudian English (BerE) is a stabilized and nativized koiné that most likely developed as a result of contact between multiple varieties of English. Bermuda never developed a creole, owing to minimal language contact and the demographic and social conditions of the islands during early settlement which are explored in Hall (2018) and Eberle (2018, 2021). Like other Atlantic islands, Bermuda does not fit comfortably into any of the geographical groupings traditionally used in World English studies – perhaps this explains BerE’s status as a lesser-known variety of English (LKVE). When referring to BerE, early commentators struggled to ‘place’ it, and grouped it impressionistically with British, American and Caribbean varieties. In the first written summary of BerE, Ayres (1933) described it as follows: It has the level tone of American speech, the briskness of the coastal type, a characteristic crispness, and would create least remark, if indeed any at all, between, say, Norfolk, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina. (p. 4) Hall (2019) points out that the World English typology of BerE is also uncertain and complex. As a dependent territory that has never had an aboriginal population, Bermuda does not meet the criteria for either ‘settler colonial’ or ‘postcolonial’ Englishes (Denis & D’Arcy, 2018), but sits somewhere in between. In her 2021 volume, Eberle (2021) addresses the typology of BerE, arguing that BerE has consistently influenced and been influenced by other Caribbean varieties. In an earlier study focused on Black speakers, Eberle and Schreier (2013) discuss the history of BerE and its structural and social similarities and differences with Caribbean varieties. In contrast, Trudgill (2002), who focused on White speakers, argues for greater similarities to North American varieties. Historical factors have led to a somewhat unusual linguistic situation in which the English spoken in Bermuda has always been characterized not only by multiracial contact but also by widespread patterns of migration. British colonizers began the process of importing slaves in 1617 (Jarvis, 2002), mainly from West Africa and the Caribbean, though also from US Native American tribes. Sociolinguistic conditions in early Bermuda were quite different from those in most of the Caribbean, since Bermuda had a fairly stable population and there was a relatively high level of contact between the white population and the enslaved peoples whom they exploited. Both today and over the centuries since its settlement, Bermuda has had significant contact with the US, the Caribbean and the UK as a result of geopolitical relationships, economic strategy and, in the case of the US, physical proximity. All these factors are linked to patterned sociolinguistic variation within BerE, especially along lines related to race and mobility. In one of the earliest observations about sociolinguistic variation on the island, Trudgill notes: ‘there are noticeable differences between the speech of Blacks and that of Whites – the former being more Caribbean in character, the latter more like the English of coastal South Carolina’ (2002, p. 32). Therefore, when we discuss BerE, we cannot overlook that this type of variation is inherent to the variety, though linguistic descriptions have not always captured the full range. Many scholars (Trudgill, 2002; Holliday, 2016; Hall, 2018; Hall, 2019) have also discussed the possibility of at least two sub-varieties of BerE. Eberle specifically refers to ‘African Bermudian English’ (ABerE) in her work (2021), and Trudgill (2019) discusses ‘White Bermudian English’ (WhBerE).
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Structure of Bermudian English Phonology BerE has a complex combination of phonological features characteristic of a non-standard koiné. Although impressionistic, the first written description of BerE (Ayres, 1933) usefully describes a number of phonological features (twelve vowels and six consonants) with examples. After Ayres’ description, there is no mention of Bermuda in the linguistic literature until Wells’ Accents of English (1982). However, Wells discusses only ‘v-w confusion’. Aceto (2004, 2008) mentions two features, recording [æ] for /ɛ/ and [w] for /v/ (p. 294); Hall has since revisited the behavior of /v/ and /w/ in BerE and suggests a merger with [v], [w] and [β] as variants. Holliday (2016) provides the first acoustic description of the vowel systems of a group of young black Bermudian speakers. She notes the key distinctive features of fronted high and mid-back vowels, a potential DRESS-TRAP merger, and pre-rhotic centralization and merger of the NEAR and SQUARE vowels in word final position. Focusing on Black Bermudian English (BBerE), Hall (2018) provides the first complete phonological overview of BerE and indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary’s pronunciation model for BerE is based on this work. Hall (2018, pp. 67–68) describes the following features as characteristic of BBerE: • Vowel mergers • DRESS and TRAP • NURSE, NEAR and SQUARE (merged on and /ɝ/) • NORTH, FORCE, CLOTH and THOUGHT (though Hall observes that NORTH and FORCE appear to be un-merging and becoming rhotacized as a result of US influence). • Non-rhoticity, except for some categorically rhotic sets. Hall observes that ‘NURSE, NEAR and SQUARE are categorically rhotic, but START, NORTH, FORCE, CURE, and lettER only variably so, with the most conservative BBerE tending towards r-lessness’. • The pattern of phonologically conditioned variation in BBerE vowels is complex. Only the PALM, happY, lettER and commA sets are not variable, and only the BATH, START, STRUT and CURE sets have unconstrained alternation between variants. There is a notable pattern of conditioning based on coda voicing in BBerE vowels, which is evident in: KIT, FLEECE, LOT, MOUTH, GOAT, FACE, CHOICE, PRICE and possibly FOOT. • Monophthongization in the MOUTH and GOAT sets as well as FACE, NEAR and SQUARE. • Diphthongization seen in the allophonic off-glides of several BBerE vowels, including KIT, DRESS and TRAP, but also before /d/ in FOOT, before /l/ in GOOSE, and in the merged set NORTH/FORTH/CLOTH/THOUGHT. • Variability in BATH due to fluctuating influences of North American and British input. • Consonant patterns: ‘BBerE mixes parts of Caribbean TH-stopping and British TH-fronting patterns’ (Wells, 1982, pp. 96, 565). It has North American alveolar flapping, African American/Caribbean (t, d) deletion and /sk/ metathesis (the latter also being a feature of early London English) as well as a /v/–/w/ merger. The behaviour of /l/ matches that found in London and southern USA territories’ (Hall, 2018, p. 68). Besides providing a description of BBerE phonology, Hall also examines its enactment in written, spoken and computer-mediated forms of high linguistic performance including a sociophonetic analysis of racialized dialect parody by a group of white Bermudian men (2018, 2019). This work provides an important starting point for an understanding of stylistic practice in Bermuda and its relationship with Bermudian society. 122
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Morphosyntax Eberle and Schreier (2013) provide the first morphosyntactic profile of BerE, focussing on ‘African Bermudian English’ and showing similarities with selected Caribbean Englishes. Aiming to gain some ‘typological insights whether or not it aligns with English in the Caribbean’, they compare ‘ranking rates’ of twenty-four features found in ABerE with ‘Atlantic’ and ‘World-wide’ creole features to create a ‘cross-dialectal profile’ (2013, p. 296). They conclude that there has been a ‘two-way transfer pattern’ in Bermudian morphosyntax: ‘Caribbean Englishes are likely to have influenced the evolution of English on Bermuda, while BerE itself was an influential input variety in other locations (particularly the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands)’ (ibid.). Eberle and Schreier also record a ‘close relationship’ between ABerE and Bahamian English, based on nine shared features with the same ranking rates (2013, pp. 297–298). The features they discuss are as follows: • • • • • • • • •
2PP forms or phrases other than you Demonstrative them Object pronoun forms modifying possessive pronouns: 3PP Zero copula be before NPs Zero copula be before AdjPs Zero copula be before locatives For (to) as an infinitive marker Object pronouns forms as (modifying) possessive pronouns: 1PS Never as preverbal past tense negator
Clearly, much work remains to be done to arrive at a full description of morphosyntatic features and their use in variation in BerE, but Eberle and Schreier (2013) and Eberle (2021) provide important starting points for such an examination.
Conclusion Bermuda is relatively new to the sociolinguistic literature, and therefore offers a wide range of avenues for further research. As an under-researched context and a tabula rasa site of very early English dialect contact, Bermuda presents an ideal opportunity for re-examining theories of language variation and change and new dialect formation. Since Hall (2019) and Trudgill (2019) propose racialized sub-varieties of BerE, further work is needed to establish and describe these at all levels of linguistic structure. The literature on BerE is characterized by typological challenges; is this an American or a Caribbean variety? A postcolonial or a settler colonial English? And, is it made up of distinct sub-varieties? While it remains to be seen whether further research will clarify or further complicate these questions, it is clear that Bermuda represents an unusual and fertile sociolinguistic setting with the potential to lend rich insights into the mechanisms of dialect contact and socially motivated language change.
Tristan da Cunha and St Helena The South Atlantic varieties of Tristan da Cunha and St Helena have long been overlooked in sociolinguistic research. Until recently, one of the very few studies was Zettersten’s (1963) descriptive profile of Tristan da Cunha English (TdCE), based on recordings that were made by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) of native Tristanians who had to be evacuated to England in the aftermath of volcanic activities on the island. This was not really a sociolinguistic analysis, 123
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though Zettersten mentioned individual variation and differences between male and female speakers. The first empirical studies on variation and change were carried out some twenty years ago, when Schreier conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the island and collected data first-hand (first reported in Schreier, 2002a, b, 2003). A similar picture emerges for St Helena, where first smaller projects were carried out in the 1990s (Hancock, 1991; Wilson & Mesthrie, 2004), followed by an on-site sociolinguistic project (Schreier, 2003) and sociohistorical archive-based investigations (Wright, 2013). The two varieties are presented and discussed in turn.
Tristan da Cunha Tristan da Cunha is one of the most isolated permanently inhabited islands in the world. Its location in the central South Atlantic Ocean and limited accessibility (there is no airfield) means that the resident population has lived in conditions of comparatively high insularity for more than two centuries. Chambers (2004, p. 134) referred to Tristan da Cunha English (TdCE) as the ‘sociolinguists’ Galapagos’, for two reasons. For one, it is a prime research site for an analysis of language and dialect contact under tabula rasa conditions. The community was founded in 1816 by a Scotsman, along with other residents from the South African Table Bay area and Southwestern England, who later were joined by arrivals from England, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, the northeastern United States and St Helena. The island was uninhabited when the founding population arrived, so there was no contact with indigenous varieties. Studying the sociolinguistic evolution of the variety allows a rare ab ovo scenario, potential substrate transfer and change via contact with preexisting indigenous varieties can be excluded. Second, formed from the 1820s onwards, TdCE is one of the youngest nativized Englishes around the world. The input varieties to TdCE are well-known, as is the development of the local population (there is an entire genealogical tree for the island community, reprinted in Crawford, 1982). The feature pool mostly included dialects from the British Isles and the United States. However, TdCE is not the result of dialect contact and koinéization alone, as other settlers spoke second-language varieties (their native languages being Danish, Dutch, Italian and (perhaps) early 19th-century Afrikaans); though the lingua franca was English at all times, it is impossible to assess and reconstruct the nature of these input varieties. Moreover, a substantial group spoke St Helenian English (StHE), a considerably older South Atlantic variety that underwent language contact and perhaps some creolization (Schreier, 2008). As a result, the sociolinguistic history of TdCE is complex, as multiple contact processes were operative in its genesis and formation phases. Schreier (2002a, 2003) and Schreier and Trudgill (2006) argued that TdCE primarily derived from varieties of British/late 18th-century American English and StHE, as the British and St Helenian groups were the most numerous ones. While some features most likely had a(n archaic) British English origin, second-language forms may have become adopted (for instance TH sibilization, i.e. dental fricatives realized as /s/, as in think, throw, etc., or also lack of word-order variation). The existence of well-known Creole-type features (such as high rates of consonant cluster reduction and absence of -ed past tense marking; /v/ realized as [b]; copula absence with locatives and adjectivals, Schreier, 2008; etc.) most likely suggests influence from a creolized form of English on St Helena (which is in accordance with Zettersten’s 1969 claims). The community carries much potential for sociolinguistic themes other than contact linguistics, such as individual variation and mobility-induced language change. Recent research has suggested a high level of inter- and intra-individual variation on Tristan, countering the widely held assumption that isolated groups with dense, multiplex networks tend to be characterized by 124
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homogeneity. Variation correlates with speaker age, time spent in the ‘outside world’, and most of all with attitudes toward the island, less so with social stratification or family membership. Schreier (2006) showed that siblings varied significantly in their frequencies of local sociolinguistic variables though they were neighbours and shared most of their lives together. The data available allow both for real- and apparent-time analyses of change in the community. To give one example, the frequency of present tense BE leveling to is (‘I is’, ‘the boats is’) is highly advanced in TdCE. Schreier (2016) analyzed a sample of forty-five speakers and reported extremely high leveling rates in all age groups, gender effects being insignificant. Variation was almost maximal in the community, ranging from a near-standard am/is/are paradigm to a nearly categorical one with leveled is for all persons. Moreover, intergenerational variation increased throughout the 20th century, intensifying in speakers born after WWII. It correlated with factors such as the frequency of contacts with expatriates, the amount of time spent off the island and exocentricity in general, such as the feeling of belonging or where home was. Today, the status and future of TdCE are critically endangered. Though the community is not swamped by expatriates and outsiders visiting or relocating to the island, population numbers have been going down steadily over the last thirty years and have now dropped to below 250. More than half of the Tristanians are aged above fifty.
St Helena St Helenian English (StHE), by contrast, has received less sociolinguistic interest than TdCE. Hancock (1991, p. 17) noted its importance for World Englishes ‘firstly because of the many similarities with island dialects elsewhere, and secondly because of its implications for the study of nautical English, and its relationship to creolised forms of that language’. There have been several studies so far, based on questionnaires (Hancock, 1991), letters and ego-documents (Wright, 2013), telephone surveys (Wikstrom, 2015) and ethnographic fieldwork (Wilson & Mesthrie, 2004; Schreier, 2008), though the published work mostly consists of descriptive profiles without closer sociolinguistic analysis. Sociohistorical research leaves no doubt that St Helena’s contact history was at the same time multidialectal and multilingual. The origins of the variety can be pinpointed to the early 18th century, making StHE one of the oldest nativized varieties around the world. There was intense dialect contact as the British founding population came from various regions in England (perhaps with a strong input from the Home Counties, the city of London and its surroundings), and there was social stratification from very early on. The language contact situation was equally diverse. Up to a dozen different varieties co-existed on the island at various stages: these were brought from Europe (English, Dutch, Portuguese, French), Africa (references to the Gold Coast, Nigeria and southern Africa: Dutch-derived Afrikaans) and Asia (mostly Cantonese, various West-Indian languages), as well as Madagascar (Schreier, 2008). Not all of these varieties were of equal sociodemographic weight and importance. Some groups were numerically inferior (slaves from the African mainland or the Maldives, French Huguenots), others were not integrated into the community to an extent that they could have transmitted their language features to the newly developing variety (indentured laborers from Canton, liberated slaves from West Africa or later on Boer prisoners; Schreier, 2008). The potential sociolinguistic impact of input varieties can thus be pinpointed to English and Malagasy; there has been extensive contact between these languages, as the majority of slaves brought to the island were Malagasy-speaking. However, a number of factors were crucial in speeding up the rate of language shift towards English. Slave ownership was not on a large 125
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scale, it was unusual that farms had more than half a dozen slaves. They lived in close proximity to the white planters and English quickly became a means of communication in the wider community. Though English was spoken widely and very early on, individual bilingualism (Portuguese/English, Malagasy/English) was reported well into the 18th century. Though the sociohistorical evolution of the community is quite well documented, there are few quantitative and empirical analyses. Wikstrom’s (2015) study shows individual differences in vowel production and Schreier (2008) reported on regional differences in sociolinguistic variables such as Consonant Cluster Reduction (CCR) and copula absence. CCR is extremely high by comparison with other varieties (Schreier, 2008, pp. 211–212), supporting Hancock’s claim that there are relationships with creolized forms of English elsewhere. There is also some evidence of an urban/rural divide, with speakers in villages around the island having higher frequencies than those residing in Jamestown, St Helena’s capital. One of the problems is that sociolinguistic data suitable for variationist analysis were only collected for islanders born before WWII, so little is known about ongoing variation and change. This is a research desideratum indeed, as the community has become more mobile and migrant since the 1990s, particularly so after an airport was opened on the island in 2017, making it possible to travel there more easily. To conclude, TdCE and StHE are of immense interest for key sociolinguistic issues. Their location, social histories and population demographics are rather unique from a World Englishes perspective, and their evolution and development has been studied with various data sets (here one should also include the typological relationships between the two, and the 18th century contribution of StHE to the emerging TdCE; Schreier, 2019). However, they still offer considerable potential for quantitative research.
The Falkland Islands Introduction The Falkland Islands are a British Overseas Territory (BOT) consisting of over 700 islands in the western South Atlantic Ocean, 480 kilometres off the east coast of Argentina. The population of the Falklands today is around 3500, yet in an area of over 12,000 square kilometres – slightly larger than Jamaica, Cyprus and Lebanon – extremely sparsely populated therefore. The community is, in demographic terms, however, both very urban and diverse. Over 85% of the population live in the capital Stanley. The 2016 census (Policy and Economic Development Unit (PEDU) 2017, p. 7) shows that 57% of the population were not born on the Islands, with the largest migrant groups coming from the UK, St Helena (see preceding section), Chile and Zimbabwe. The census also highlighted the fact that people born in sixty-two different countries were resident on the islands at the time (PEDU, 2017, p. 31), with 15% of the population speaking one of thirty-two languages other than English in the home. By way of a comparison, in Europe only Monaco and Andorra have a higher proportion of their populations made up of migrants. In addition to the local Falkland population, there is a large British airforce presence on the islands at the Mount Pleasant Complex, 50 kilometres south-west of Stanley. Sovereignty of the Falklands is disputed by Argentina, and this led to a seventy-four-day occupation in 1982. In 2013 the Islanders voted by 1513 votes to three to remain a British Overseas Territory. What is undisputed is that there has been a continuous anglophone speech community on the islands since 1833, making it one of the most recently developed ‘Inner Circle’ Englishes in the world. 126
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History Before continuous British settlement began in 1833, there had been small-scale and sporadic informal or military presence on the islands by the French, the British, the Spanish and the Argentines. Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, the economy grew very slowly indeed and was largely dependent on providing safe haven and repair for passing ships, as well as rearing horses, the latter mostly carried out by South American, Spanish-speaking gauchos. From the 1850s onwards, the population began to grow more rapidly, partly thanks to formal campaigns to recruit workers. Many came from the Scottish highlands but also from the south and south-west of England, and Ireland. By the end of the 19th century, the population had reached 2000. The population throughout these first seventy years of Anglophone settlement was constantly in a state of flux, however, partly because many contract employees came, served their time and then went, partly because of unexpected arrivals and departures – e.g. shipwrecked Scandinavians on their way around Cape Horn, sailors who jumped ship and the return of migrants who simply couldn’t acclimatise to life in the Falklands (see Sudbury, 2000, 2001). Despite the population increase over the century, there were relatively few migrants from South America (Spruce, 1996, p. 1, suggests no more than 100), and most returned by the end of the century when the economy shifted from horses, for which the gauchos were highly skilled, to sheep, for which the expertise came from the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Apart from a brief population influx at the start of the 20th century triggered by the whaling boom, the total population began to stagnate, especially after the WWII. Between the censuses of 1946 and 1980 economic decline, the gradual fall of the price of wool on international markets, and a yearning for a more prosperous and less gruelling life, led to a population fall of 19%. The 1982 Conflict with Argentina marked the start of dramatic changes to life on the islands. A fisheries licensing zone, oil exploration licences and a rise in Antarctic cruise tourism generated considerable wealth for the islands – in 2015 their per capita GDP was estimated at $70,000p.a., the tenth highest in the world, and over 50% higher than that of the UK using the same measurement.1 The increase in general prosperity triggered a marked upsurge in immigration, the population rising by more than 36% since 1980. Today, 85% of the population live in Stanley, with the rest living in ‘Camp’ – the local term used to describe the rest of the Falklands – up from just 58% in 1980. Ties to the UK have increased significantly since the Conflict too. Islanders travel to the UK regularly, and relatively straightforwardly – what used to be a long boat journey has now been replaced by a regular flight to and from the international airport at the Mount Pleasant Complex – and more and more go there for extended periods for post-16 secondary and tertiary education.
Sociolinguistic questions Despite its small population, the importance of the Falklands for English dialectology has long been recognized (e.g. Trudgill, 1986). There was no resident indigenous population when the British resettlement began in 1833, and so the Falklands constitute one of the rare cases of colonial English emerging in a tabula rasa context, in the absence of contact with a pre-existing or indigenous local language (unlike the situation in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, etc.). The academic importance of this is that we can observe what happens in cases of dialect contact (the outcome of the mixing of dialects brought by anglophone settlers from the UK) that are not affected by language contact with indigenous groups (Trudgill, 2004). Many of the original settlers to the Falklands in the 19th century came from Scotland and the South and South-West of England. An investigation of Falkland Island English, therefore, 127
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enables us to analyse the outcomes of the mixture of dialects from these regions in what was, in the 19th century, a rather isolated and sparsely populated setting (Britain et al., 2024). One expectation in dialect contact research (Trudgill, 1986, 2004; Britain, 2018) is that in contexts of dialect mixing, forms that are in the majority in the mix often win out at the expense of minority features. In the case of the Falklands, with their extremely sparsely populated and dispersed settlements, however, we need to address the extent to which there was actual dialect mixing. Outside of the very largest settlements, there has been (and remains) no physically co-present schooling for many children – education was and still is in some places delivered by travelling teachers, and so the children in the more remote settlements do not spend, unlike their urban counterparts, many hours every day with their age peers. One of the critical contexts, therefore, for the dialect mixing essential for new dialect formation was simply not part of the everyday reality for many islanders growing up in Camp. Trudgill (1986, p. 128), indeed, concludes that in the more dispersed settlements ‘very little mixing has taken place, and very little focussing’. Our analyses of contemporary Falkland Island English suggest Trudgill was correct for the older speakers in the community: we find, for example, that islanders with Scottish ancestry are much more likely, just as we would expect, to avoid intrusive /r/ to resolve vowel-vowel hiatus across word boundaries, to use allophonic conditioned variability for the pronunciation of the /ai/ diphthong and to avoid wh- restrictive relative pronouns than islanders without. These contemporary traces of dialect heritage are diminishing, however, as more and more youngsters spend time at school in Stanley, or travel to the UK for post-16 education. There must have been some mixing however, because the contemporary variety has levelled away some of the more salient and uncommon features of the ingredient settler dialects from Scotland and the South-West. There is no trace, for example, of Scottish double modals or the use of -nae as a negator of do and modal verbs, and we find no examples of South-Western forms such as the use of periphrastic do, demonstrative pronoun ‘thik’ [ðɪk], cliticized ‘m (e.g. we’m), gendered pronouns, or pronoun exchange, etc. (see Britain, 2021). Anglophone settlement of the Falklands took place at approximately the same time as that of New Zealand and Australia. Interesting, therefore, is the extent to which the Falklands show similar characteristics to these other Southern Hemisphere inner circle Englishes. Sudbury’s pioneering (2000, 2001) research on Falkland Island English considered just this question, highlighting the similarities but also the many differences between Falkland English on the one hand, and Australasian Englishes on the other. The Falklands have seen an increased population since the 1982 Conflict with Argentina, as a result of which the population has, furthermore, become more diverse, and, benefits from easier, quicker, and more intensive access and contact to the UK, because of infrastructural improvements in the transport system, the uptake of post-16 education, and the rapidly developing economy. This appears to have had a significant impact on the structure of the dialect spoken by islanders. Many of the settlers in the 19th and 20th centuries came with manual agrarian skills, and brought mostly rural traditional dialects with them. Many islanders, then, born in the first half of the 20th century, use(d) a range of non-standard dialect features (Britain & Sudbury, 2013), typical for many parts of the UK, such as: • Non-standard past tense verb forms: he come to see me yesterday; we was only there a few minutes • Negative concord • Inflectionless adverbs • Double comparison forms (e.g. the most stupidest, the more stricter) 128
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Such forms are much less common among younger islanders today (Britain et al., 2024). Socioeconomic changes since the Conflict seem to have led to a convergence of the local dialect towards more standard Southern English English morphosyntactic structures. It was mentioned earlier that the British settlers encountered no indigenous language when they arrived in the 1830s. This does not mean that there was no language contact at all, however. The economically critical presence of the gauchos in the 19th century left a number of Spanish lexical traces (Britain & Sudbury, 2010; Britain & Hedegard, 2022; Rodríguez Gutiérrez, 2022), including: • A large number of Spanish-language origin place names (which are often phonetically anglicized): e.g. Tranquilidad [trɪŋkəliːdaː]). • Camp, from Spanish campo, used to mean anywhere in the Falklands outside of the capital Stanley. • Chay, a discourse marker functioning as a vocative, and similar to ‘mate’ or ‘dude’. Its origins are controversial (see Rodríguez Gutiérrez, 2022, p. 164), but it clearly came to the Falklands via South American Spanish. • A number of borrowings connected with horse-rearing. These include: cojinillo [kɒkəˈniːʒə] (sheepskin on a saddle); bosal [bəuˈsaːɫ]/[bəˈsaɫ] (halter); passarlibre, to denote a cattle grid. Apart from camp and chay, however, the actual use of Spanish lexis declined considerably over the 20th century as horses and horse-rearing became less important in an increasingly urbanising community (Britain & Hedegard, 2022).
Note 1 www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/real-gdp-per-capita/country-comparison. Last accessed 9th October 2022.
References Aceto, M. (2004). Eastern Caribbean English-derived language varieties: Phonology. In E. Schneider, K. Burridge, B. Kortmann, R. Mesthrie, & C. Upton (Eds.), A handbook of varieties of English (pp. 481–500). Mouton de Gruyter. Aceto, M. (2008). Eastern Caribbean English-derived language varieties: Phonology. Varieties of English, 2, 290–311. Ayres, H. M. (1933). Bermudian English. American Speech, 8, 3–10. Britain, D. (2018). Dialect contact and new dialect formation. In C. Boberg, J. Nerbonne, & D. Watt (Eds.), Handbook of dialectology (pp. 143–158). Wiley. Britain, D. (2021). Grammatical variation in the contemporary spoken English of England. In A. Kirkpatrick (Ed.), The handbook of world Englishes (pp. 32–58). Routledge. Britain, D., & Hedegard, H. (2022). How influential has Spanish been on the structure of Falkland Island English? Paper presented at the Historical Sociolinguistics Network conference, Universidad de Murcia, June 2022. Britain, D., Hedegard, H., & Sudbury, A. (2024). Falkland Island English. Mouton. Britain, D., & Sudbury, A. (2010). South Atlantic Ocean: Falkland Island English. In D. Schreier, P. Trudgill, E. Schneider, & J. Williams (Eds.), The lesser known varieties of English (pp. 209–223). Cambridge University Press. Britain, D., & Sudbury, A. (2013). Falkland Island English. In B. Kortmann & K. Lunkenheimer (Eds.), The Mouton world atlas of variation in English (pp. 669–676). Mouton de Gruyter. Chambers, J. K. (2004). Dynamic typology and vernacular universals. In B. Kortmann (Ed.), Dialectology meets typology (pp. 127‒145). Mouton de Gruyter.
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Rosemary Hall et al. Crawford, A. (1982). Tristan da Cunha and the Roaring Forties. Allen & Unwin. Cutler, C., Hackert, S., & Seymour, C. (2006). Bermuda and the Bahamas. In U. Ammon (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society: Volume 3 (pp. 2066–2073). Walter de Gruyter. Denis, D., & D’Arcy, A. (2018). Settler colonial Englishes are distinct from postcolonial Englishes. American Speech, 93, 3–31. Eberle, N. (2018). Bermudian English: Origins and variation [PhD thesis, University of Zurich]. Eberle, N. (2021). Bermudian English: A sociohistorical and linguistic profile. Benjamins. Eberle, N., & Schreier, D. (2013). African Bermudian English and the Caribbean connection. English WorldWide, 34, 279–304. Hall, R. (2018). Staging language in Bermuda: Phonology and parodic performance of Bermudian English [PhD thesis, University of Oxford]. Hall, R. (2019). The MOUTHs of others: The linguistic performance of race in Bermuda. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23, 223–243. Hancock, I. (1991). St. Helenian English. In F. Byrne & T. Huebner (Eds.), Development and structures of Creole languages (pp. 17–28). Benjamins. Holliday, N. (2016). Bermudian English: An acoustic analysis of vowel properties with implications for sociophonetic variation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140(4). Jarvis, M. (2002). Maritime masters and seafaring slaves in Bermuda, 1680–1783. The William and Mary Quarterly, 59, 585–622. Policy and Economic Development Unit (PEDU). (2017). 2016 census report. Stanley. Rodríguez Gutiérrez, Y. (2022). Spanish-English contact in the Falkland Islands: An ethnographic approach to loanwords and place names [PhD thesis, Universiteit Leiden]. Schreier, D. (2002a). Terra incognita in the Anglophone world: Tristan da Cunha, South Atlantic Ocean. English World-Wide, 23, 1–29. Schreier, D. (2002b). Past be in Tristan da Cunha: The rise and fall of categoricality in language change. American Speech, 77, 70–99. Schreier, D. (2003). Isolation and language change: Contemporary and sociohistorical evidence from Tristan da Cunha English. Palgrave Macmillan. Schreier, D. (2006). The backyard as a dialect boundary? Individuation, linguistic heterogeneity and sociolinguistic eccentricity in a small speech community. Journal of English Linguistics, 34, 26–57. Schreier, D. (2008). St Helenian English: Origins, evolution and variation. Benjamins. Schreier, D. (2016). Super-leveling, fraying-out, internal restructuring: A century of present be concord in Tristan da Cunha English. Language Variation and Change, 28, 203–224. Schreier, D. (2019). /h/ insertion as a “camouflaged archaism”? Dialect contact, colonial lag and the feature pool in South Atlantic English. Diachronica, 36, 36–64. Schreier, D., & Trudgill, P. (2006). The segmental phonology of 19th century Tristan da Cunha English: Convergence and local innovation. English Language and Linguistics, 10, 119–141. Spruce, J. (1996). Falkland words. Unpublished manuscript. Sudbury, A. (2000). Dialect contact and koineization in the Falkland Islands: Development of a Southern Hemisphere variety? [PhD thesis, University of Essex]. Sudbury, A. (2001). Is Falkland Islands English a southern hemisphere variety? English World-Wide, 22, 55–80. Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in contact. Blackwell. Trudgill, P. (2004). New dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh University Press. Trudgill, P. (2019). Bermudian English as a North American dialect: A note on the segmental phonology. Researchgate Publications. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330180330 Trudgill, P., & Hannah, J. (2002). International English: A guide to the varieties of standard English. Oxford University Press. Wells, J. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge University Press. Wikstrom, E. J. (2015). Towards an inventory of St Helena Phonology: Vowels [PhD thesis, University of Cambridge]. Wilson, S., & Mesthrie, R. (2004). St. Helena English: Morphology and syntax. In B. Kortmann, E. Schneider, R. Mesthrie, & K. Burridge (Eds.), A handbook of varieties of English: Morphology and syntax (pp. 1006–1015). Mouton de Gruyter. Wright, L. (2013). The language of slaves on the island of St Helena, South Atlantic, 1682–1724. In M. van der Wal & G. Rutten (Eds.), Touching the past: Studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documents (pp. 243–276). Benjamins. Zettersten, A. (1969). The English of Tristan da Cunha. Gleerup. Zuill, W. S. (1983). The story of Bermuda and her people (2nd ed.). Macmillan.
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PART II
Asia
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-13
11 CHINA Sociolinguistic research in the 21st century Minglang Zhou
Introduction In the first two decades of the 21st century, the People’s Republic of China (henceforth China) became a mammoth sociolinguistic lab for sociolinguists attempting to capture rapidly unfolding sociolinguistic developments. These developments were significantly accelerated by three major factors. The first is China’s extensive engagement in globalization, which led to a domestic craze for English and global promotion of Chinese. The second is China’s rapid urbanization, starting with an urban population of 36.09% of the total population in 2000 and reaching that of 64.72% in 2021 (China, 2022). The urbanization brought about sociolinguistic developments in expanding metropolises and withering countryside. The last, but not the least, the domestic migration population, mainly from Western China to coastal China, increased from about 113 million in 2010 to 385 million in 2021 (China, 2022). The waves of migration initiated changes in individual sociolinguistic behaviors and reorganization of speech communities nationwide. In this context, Chinese sociolinguists have both reached out to the international sociolinguistic community and consolidated their footing in domestic scholarship. The outreach includes sending young sociolinguists to study abroad, inviting established international sociolinguists to lecture at Chinese universities, and encouraging Chinese sociolinguists to publish internationally. Meanwhile, the consolidation of their domestic footing or “nativization” embraces the development of a domestic school of sociolinguistic research as well as internationalization of domestic sociolinguistic research. The efforts propelled the field moving from the dialectology-oriented to the anthropology-oriented in the late 20th century and finally to sociolinguistics in the first two decades of this century. Reviewing research in the CNKI, the main database of Chinese scholarship,1 the current chapter first examines the globalization of sociolinguistics in China, focusing on major impacts of international sociolinguistic scholarship on Chinese sociolinguistic research. It then scrutinizes the nativization of sociolinguistic research in China, spotlighting progress, strength, and weaknesses. The chapter concludes with some general critiques and prospects.
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-14
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Globalizing sociolinguistics At the turn of the 21st century, China’s early effort to narrow the gap between domestic and international sociolinguistic scholarship was found in two approaches. First, domestically trained sociolinguists, represented by Zhou Qingsheng, translated important sociolinguistic work from English into Chinese. Second, internationally trained sociolinguists, represented by Xu Daming, provided systematic sociolinguistic training. In the last two decades, these two approaches have evolved extensively. For instance, the translation has expanded to cover works in the international series Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics. The training has been provided directly by internationally established sociolinguists who taught or lectured in person or online in China in the last decade. The effort to globalize sociolinguistics has a significant impact on China’s sociolinguistic research as indicated by dramatic increase in publications, both in Chinese and English. The impact of international sociolinguistic scholarship is best seen in some research themes of two key conferences, the International Conference on Chinese Sociolinguistics (ICCS) and the National Conference on Chinese Sociolinguistics (NCCS). The ICCS is sponsored by the Sociolinguistic Society of China which is registered in Hong Kong. The NCCS is administered by the Institute of Applied Linguistics of the Chinese Ministry of Education. Their themes reflect the influence of international sociolinguistic scholarship and the Chinese government’s concerns about certain sociolinguistic issues. This section reviews major research work of three themes featured at these conferences: (a) language identity, (b) language contact and variation, and (c) linguistic diversity as well as themes of linguistic landscape, introduced by internationalized Chinese scholars. First, a subject search of the CNKI indicates that, of 598 Chinese publications on language identity, only 16 was published before the joint ICCS and NCCS highlighted the theme in 2006. A major divide among these Chinese studies is the treatment of language identity as static or dynamic though relevant paradigms of Norton and Dömyei were introduced (Fang, 2018a; Gao et al., 2008; Q. Zhou, 2016). The static approach considers language identity as attitudes and loyalty to specific languages. Some studies examined the relationship between language loyalty and ethnicity in families, communities, and nation-state building (Chen, 2012; Huang, 2012), while others investigated the development of individuals’ language loyalty and use as well as migrant groups’ language attitudes and use in urban settings (Shi & Jiang, 2021; Wu, 2013; Yu, 2012). In the dynamic approach, some recognized the role of language in identity construction but still focused on language attitudes, loyalty, and use in general (Chen & Cai, 2016; Qin & Xu, 2016; Zhang & Zhang, 2021). On the other hand, a few studies actually analyzed how language identity is constructed with language use and learning from multiple perspectives (Chen, 2020; Dong, 2016). In addition to the two major approaches, some treated language identity as the identity of a specific language (W. Guo, 2017; Huang, 2012), while others proposed to characterize speech communities by evaluating the relationship between language identity and certain linguistic forms (L. Wang, 2009). In short, there lacks a consensus on the concept of language identity nor are there well-established paradigms of research methodology. Second, there are over 4,000 publications on language contact and variation in the CNKI, the majority of which appeared after 2007. Thus, the focus here is on language contact and variation in China’s multilingual contexts created by urbanization, migration, and Putonghua (Mandarin) spread. As multilingualism expands, sociolinguistic research reveals two significant lines of variations: the localization of Putonghua and standardization of local languages. The localization of Putonghua involves the integration of features of Mandarin dialects, Sinitic languages, and nonSinitic languages into local versions of Putonghua, resulting in Shanghai Putonghua, Guangzhou Putonghua, Lhasa Putonghua, etc. (L, Li, 2013; Y. Li, 2014; Lü & Yu, 2021). Some studies treated 134
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such local versions as varieties of Putonghua, which evolved in stages or generations in communities (D. Sun, 2013; Y. Wang, 2008), but others were confused about the distinction between community varieties and individual interlanguage (Jing & Niu, 2010; Ma, 2016). On the other hand, the standardization of local dialects and Sinitic languages refers to variations that absorb Putonghua’s phonological and lexical features into these dialects and languages and adjust their native systems toward Putonghua (J. Guo, 2009). Beyond the Sinitic languages, some contact-induced variations were found in languages in the Sino-Tibetan and Altaic families, whose impact was in return seen in local Chinese (Luo & Zhuo, 2013; Piao, 2014; J. Zhang, 2015). The other major research topic on the expanding multilingual society is code choice, including switching and mixing, of nearly 1,500 studies of which only 162 were published before 2007. These studies investigated code choice on school campuses where Putonghua and English are taught and spoken, in migrant communities where migrants’ native languages, Putonghua, and dialects of new home are spoken, and in multilingual families (Lai & Wen, 2017; Y. Liu, 2010; Zaoreguli & Tang, 2014). Migration has broadly shaped code choice. Migrants’ code choice often leads to shift to Putonghua and dialects of cities of their new home in a process termed “linguistic urbanization”, through which migrants attempted to integrate into urban life in China’s construction of urban linguistic civilization (Wang & Wang, 2016; D. Xu, 2020; Yu, 2017). Migrants did not only change their code choice (favoring Putonghua) in their destinations but also back in their old home (Wu & Yang, 2014). Many of these studies were influenced by C. Myers-Scotton’s classical work but recently the concept of translanguaging was introduced to examine code choice in classrooms (Li & Shen, 2021; Song & Lin, 2021). Third, the theme of linguistic diversity became popular after Fan Junjun translated UN and UNESCO’s documents on cultural and linguistic diversity into Chinese in 2006 and ICCS featured the theme in 2010, though some projects were initiated by leading ethnolinguists, Sun Hongkai and Dai Qingxia, around the turn of the century (Xu, 2015). Research was mainly done on the subjects of endangered languages and language protection. Regarding endangered languages, the first question is how to identify them in the Chinese context without overly expanding the list and missing truly endangered ones (Dai, 2015). Some suggest to follow the UNESCO criteria while adding specific quantitative criteria (Huang, 2014; J. Li, 2015). For example, in the case of intergenerational transmission, the number of one thousand speakers is set as the breaking point for a community, below which its language is put on the endangered list and above which it is not. Indeed, case studies consistently show that the interruption of intergenerational transmission is the best indicator of endangerment, though the increase of syntactic simplification and variation are serious signals (Huang & Yin, 2015; H. Sun, 2017). Next comes the thorny question whether endangered languages should be protected or preserved (Cao, 2017; Fan, 2018). For political and legal reasons, the protection of endangered languages is generally understood as the preservation of them in digital archives instead of keeping them alive. This understanding has four outcomes. First, state-sponsored studies mainly engaged field documentation of endangered languages, from which 50 books were published between 2017 and 2019. Second, many studies involved the technology of digital archive construction in order to store extensive fieldwork. Third, little work is done to maintain the ecology for the survival of endangered languages. Fourth, this Chinese practice is internationalized to guide the international discourse on the topic when it was incorporated into UNESCO’s Yuelu Proclamation about linguistic diversity in 2018 (L. Wang, 2019). The fourth popular theme, linguistic landscape, was systematically introduced by Guowen Shang & Shouhui Zhao (2014a, 2014b), both sociolinguists trained and working abroad, in 2014, before which there were only 12 relevant publications. Of over 600 studies, most involve simple 135
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adoptions of the approach. Some studies did integrate the approach within the Chinese context, examining linguistic landscape from the perspectives of urban internationalization, minority language vitality, migrant identity construction, China’s grand strategies, and cultural inheritance and thus producing several interesting findings. First, the salience of public signs, both the top-down and bottom-up, represents the power relations that reflect the domestic and global language orders with Chinese and English at the respective top (Li & Xia, 2017; J. Su, 2017). Second, linguistic landscapes diachronically indicate an increase of the dominance of Chinese over minority languages in minority centers, such as Lhasa, but synchronically a decrease from the center to the periphery, such as from Urumqi to Kashgar (Y. Li, 2019; Yang & Mei, 2016). Third, domestic migrants were found to identify with the linguistic landscape of their ghettos while African migrants found little linguistic signage in their ghettos to identify with (H. Liu, 2020; Wu & Zhan, 2017). Fourth, linguistic landscape embedded a normative concern that is interwoven with globalization, nationalism, pluralism, and language planning (Tian & Zhang, 2014). In sum, the review of the preceding four featured research themes shows that the newly introduced sociolinguistic theories and methods opened vast new horizons for Chinese sociolinguists and greatly stimulated their scholarly productivity. However, they appear to be on a learning curve to use these theories and methods critically and creatively.
Nativizing sociolinguistics As a global player since the turn of the century, China’s rise rests on the tripod of its economy, military, and soft power (M. Zhou, 2019). To strengthen its soft power, China calls for the nativization of scholarship by generating new ideas from the Chinese context, doing innovative research in China, and publishing breakthrough research, first in Chinese. In response, a new school of sociolinguistics, known as “language life”, began to emerge in 2004 and has evolved as the dominant school in the following decade. This section reviews the development of this new school and examines some key research themes unfolded under its umbrella in the past decade. When discussing the translation of the title of China’s green paper in 2004, the sociolinguists in charge debated whether to use the customary translation “language situation in China” or a word-for-word translation “language life situation in China”. Preeminent sociolinguists and language planners, Li Yuming and Chen Zhangtai, supported the use of the term “language life (yuyan shenghuo)”, the latter of whom adopted the term from Japan in the 1980s (Zou, 2015). By 2006, the discussion was over and the term “language life” replaced “language situation (yuyan zhuangkuang)” in the Chinese context. However, none of the sociolinguists expected that thoughts and research about language life would have evolved into a school of sociolinguistics that overshadowed theoretic and corpus-based linguistic research in China in the following decade. The rise of the language life school relies on two key factors. Politically, in response to the state’s call to nativize scholarship, research projects about language life are aligned with the slogan to serve the people and nation, more specifically, to serve state policies and needs. Thus, these projects have been generously funded by the state. Methodologically, these projects have extensively involved graduate students who wrote their dissertations and published their research based on the sub-projects that they carried out under the guidance of their advisors. These fully funded projects have trained a large number of sociolinguists in the past decade, who are now graduate advisors themselves and train more graduate students in the study of language life. The concept of language life shared by this scholarly community includes (a) the study of languages alive in reality, (b) the bridge between micro-level studies, e.g. variation, and macro-level 136
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Language
Language knowledge
Language technology
Using Learning Researching
√ √ √
√ √ √
√ √ √
studies, e.g. national language capacity, and (c) the objective to construct and maintain a harmonious language life (Guo & Zhu, 2016). Li Yuming (2012, 2016), the leading scholar of this school, suggested that the concept covers learning, using, and researching languages as well as the application of language research results, subsequently proposed three levels of language life, and eventually reached a three-dimensional matrix of the scopes of language life. The three levels are (1) the macro-level of state language life, such as the role of language in nation-state building and the state’s global outreach; (2) the meso-level of various geographic, ethnic, and trade communities; and (3) the micro-level of individuals, families, and institutions. These three levels encompass nine scopes of language life, yielded in the matrix in Table 11.1. It might be questioned whether the three levels are sociolinguistically well-motivated, and individuals, families, and institutions belong to the same level. Furthermore, it might be argued that the concept of language life lacks a theoretical account of the dynamics of sociolinguistic life in reality. However, Guo Xi (Guo & Zhu, 2016), another leading scholar of language life, made it clear that the language life school is currently problem-driven, not theory-driven, but theories are expected to be developed naturally in the process of problem solving. To examine if it is the case, four major research themes, that is, national language capacity (guojia yuyan nengli), language security (yuyan anquan), and national language’s alleviation of poverty (Putonghua fupin), and global spread and maintenance of Chinese (Hanyu guoji chuanbo, Huayu chuancheng), are reviewed for their contributions to the language life school. Borrowing the concept of national language capacity advanced at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington DC (Brecht & Walton, 1993; Brecht & Rivers, 2000), Li Yuming (2011) first proposed five components: capacities of varieties of languages, the national language at home and abroad, citizens’ bi/multilingualism, language technology, and the management of national language life. Basically, Li (2021) considered that individuals’ ability to use languages in coping with everyday life and the state’s capacity to use languages in the management of its national and international affairs should be harmoniously coordinated by the state language agencies. Li’s proposal was well received by Chinese sociolinguists who have furthered research on this topic, producing about 200 publications in a decade, though there are some disagreements about the components and scopes (L. Guo, 2012; Su et al., 2019). The first problem that appears to be preliminarily resolved is the assessment of national language capacity. Based on Wen’s (2016) study of evaluative indicators, a national language capacity index system was developed (T. Zhang, 2021). This system consists of five first-tier indexes (capacities in language management, implementation, creation, development, and spread), 12 secondtier indexes (e.g. capacities to spread the national language and produce global influence), and 26 third-tier indexes (e.g. national language’s use in international institutions, scholarly indexes, and teaching institutions abroad). The system was used to evaluate the national language capacities of 193 countries globally, ranking the United States, China, Great Britain, Germany, and Russia at the top in 2021. 137
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This evaluative index system is not perfect. For instance, it recognizes global influences mainly as language use in international institutions and scholarly circles within Wen’s (2016) framework. Some Chinese sociolinguists argue that global influence involves the state’s discursive ability to guide globally what is said, how it is said, and in what language. Further, Wen (2017) treats the state’s discursive ability as a component of language resources. She criticizes China’s lack in a national discourse coordination strategy, absence of the study of discourses adopted by various countries, and lack of differentiation of its domestic and international discourses. To remedy this situation, Shen (2021) proposes the construction of national discursive ability, arguing that discourse can be planned as language is. Discourse planning includes six dimensions: discourse corpus, status, education, prestige, translation, and terminology. The objective is to support the global influence of China’s grand strategies, such as the Belt and Road Initiative. Moreover, during the pandemic of the COVID-19, emergency language service was added as a new dimension of national language capacity (H. Wang, 2020). Second, language security, as a popular research theme within language life, has been extensively debated. Some scholars (Fang, 2018b) consider it a native concept without any link to the international sociolinguistic community, but others (Shen, 2014) argue for such a connection. The early notion of language security treats issues in the continuum of language as resources and as problems (Z. Chen, 2009). Studies along this line are mainly concerned about balanced language planning so that languages will not come into conflict, resulting in ethnic and religious clashes. This notion clearly covers two separate issues, security of languages and national security. However, subsequent studies emphasize one or other of these issues. The security of languages is often understood as mother tongue security. From a nationalist perspective, some studies suggest that Chinese as the national language is threatened and polluted by English (Fang, 2016). From an ecological perspective, some studies call for support and protection of minority languages and indicate a close relationship between national security and the status of minority languages (Bateer, 2011). Regarding China’s national security, some studies propose a national defense language policy like the U.S. Critical Language Program as well as internet language policies against foreign linguistic and cultural infiltration (Guo & Yang, 2021; R. Zhao, 2010). Obviously, these studies start from a political stand rather than a sociolinguistic one. Zhang Zhiguo (2018) approaches this problem more sociolinguistically whereby he categorizes languages into the domestic, foreign, and crossborder and examines national security issues in relation to the sociolinguistics of each of these three groups. In short, as an emerging field, the concept of language security needs refining and approaches need to be both theoretically and empirically motivated. The third research theme within language life is the role of Putonghua in poverty alleviation, which Chinese sociolinguists have extensively studied since 2016, in response to China’s campaign to eliminate poverty by 2020. The majority of nearly two hundred publications focused on qualitative research, whereas only a small minority of them engaged quantitative research. Qualitative research generally justifies a positive role of Putonghua in poverty alleviation from both political and scholarly perspectives (Su, 2020; C. Wang, 2019a; Zhang & Zhang, 2020). The political justifications include the state leadership’s instructions on the correlation between poverty and the lack of Putonghua proficiency, state policies, the status quo of low Putonghua proficiency in poverty areas, and problems in Putonghua education. Scholarly arguments are mainly made in terms of Marschak’s (1965) economics of language, W. Zhang’s (2008) language as human capital, and Nettle’s (2000) Fishman-Pool hypothesis (see Fishman, 1968; Pool, 1972). The hypothesis, which was already rejected by Fishman himself (1991) but failed to be recognized by Nettle, is widely cited to support the claim that multilingualism hinders economic development. 138
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In the qualitative approach, migrant workers’ language use and Putonghua proficiency are frequently studied as human capital but are seldom examined in relation to their actual income (Yu, 2019). The negligence reflects a general assumption of Putonghua as capital for people in poor rural areas to obtain better paid urban jobs. Indeed, a qualitative study found that rural laborers’ urban employment increased 2.8–3.5% for the advance of a level of their Putonghua proficiency (He, 2020). Among the few that examined the relationship between Putonghua and income, a case study found that, even without migration, local residents who spoke better Putonghua often had better income in a poverty-stricken county (Huang & Wang, 2020). Among the surveyed residents, 99.33% non-Putonghua speakers, but only 53.36% fluent Putonghua speakers, belonged to the low annual income group (less than ¥1,000). It appears that Putonghua is the maker or breaker for income level. To identify the contribution of competing factors to poverty, another case study, using the statistical methodology Mkα in the analysis of the data of 212 poor households in rural villages in Kashgar, found that, among six factors (income, education, health, living condition, Putonghua, and ability in capital accumulation), low education and low Putonghua proficiency contributed 30.21% and 25.02% respectively to poverty there in 2018 (Guan & Li, 2020). In short, like the qualitative research, the quantitative studies also suggest that multilingualism without Putonghua correlates with poverty and that learning Putonghua is a way out of poverty. However, some studies found a positive impact of foreign language proficiency on income (Bian et al., 2019). The last popular theme to be reviewed is global spread and maintenance of Chinese, which covers two separate topics, global Chinese spread (Hanyu guoji chuanbo) and Chinese maintenance outside the mainland (Huayu chuancheng). Both are considered a means to project China’s soft power globally (C. Wang, 2019b). Research on global Chinese spread, originally known as global Chinese promotion (Hanyu guoji tuiguang), produced a few thousand publications, about a third of which are concerned with the macro level and two-thirds of which involve the micro level. Many of the macro studies attempt to justify the role of global Chinese spread in China’s soft power projection, implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative and other grand strategies (Tang, 2015; X. Zhang, 2011). Some studies suggest ways to improve teacher training, Confucius Institutes’ operations, sociolinguistic understanding of target countries, etc. (Lu, 2013; Wang & Wang, 2016), but only a few focus on language spread. Among the last group, Wang Hui (2019) proposed a hybrid model of language spread, in which government language policies may push the spread and market forces may pull it. The combination of the push and pull factors yields four variations of the model: Strong push and pull, weak push and pull, strong push but weak pull, and weak push but strong pull. As the West becomes more suspicious of China’s intentions, X. Liu (2021) developed a risk assessment system which is based on Cooper’s (1989) 7-Ws regarding language spread and the COSO Enterprise Risk Management Framework. The system appraises three levels of risks, low, medium, and high, for the operation of Chinese spread in a specific country, based on two first-tier variables (spread and control mechanism), eight second-tier variables (e.g. agency, content, and receiver), and 39 third-tier variables (e.g. political factor, motivation, and identity). Many of the micro studies are case reports of Confucius Institutes, Confucius Classrooms, and Chinese Bridge in various countries while others are case studies of international students learning Chinese in China. Examples include the sociolinguistics of students’ Chinese names (Jing, 2012), Chinese images created in international Chinese textbooks (Zhu & Zhang, 2018), motivations in learning Chinese (Liu & Wang, 2016), affect and anxiety in learning Chinese (Cao & Tian, 2017; Li & Sigley, 2011), and attitudes toward Chinese (Yang & Su, 2016). However, none of these micro studies are creative in theory and methodology while many of them suffer from deficits in conceptualization and methodology. 139
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On the other hand, research on Chinese maintenance beyond the mainland targets Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Chinese diasporas worldwide. First of all, to define the relationship between Chinese and overseas Chinese (Huayu), macro studies justify that they are diachronically and synchronically the same language and belong to the same speech community (Xu & Wang, 2009; S. Zhao, 2017), while micro studies examine morphological and syntactic variations and motivations for these variations in different sub-communities (Diao & Hou, 2016; X. Guo, 2022; Tian & Su, 2019). On this base, some propose the term, “greater Chinese” (Da Huayu), which includes four major varieties, Putonghua, Guoyu (the national language) spoken in Taiwan, standard Chinese spoken in Hong Kong and Macau, and standard Chinese spoken in Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia (Y. Li, 2017), and further treat greater Chinese as a resource for China’s language capacity (X. Guo, 2020). Most of the research zooms in on overseas Chinese maintenance in specific countries, communities, and even families (C. Li, 2021; H. Liu, 2021; X. Wang, 2018), while others investigate language contact, variation, code choice, and linguistic landscape in Chinese diasporas (X. Wang, 2020; Xu & Zhao, 2011; Zeng, 2019). Thus, the research on overseas Chinese maintenance is sociolinguistically more solid than that on global Chinese spread. In sum, as nativization, the language life school has energized extensive research on sociolinguistic issues that China faced in its rapid industrialization and globalization early in this century. Based on this overview, however, the school appears to be a philosophy of sociolinguistics rather than a school of sociolinguistic theory.
Conclusion This review demonstrates that Chinese sociolinguists have undoubtedly narrowed the gap between research in China and that in the international sociolinguistic community since my last review (M. Zhou, 2010). Their research simultaneously underwent globalization and nativization, which largely reflect China’s open-door policy of bringing-in and going-global strategies. The bringing-in of international sociolinguistic scholars and scholarship inspired an impressive growth of sociolinguistic studies, however, which are mostly simple replicas in theory and methodology. The going-out on the basis of expanding “native” scholarship to influence the international sociolinguistic community offered some new insights but suffered from political limits. Two factors appear to have constrained most Chinese sociolinguists’ ability to employ the introduced theories and methods critically and creatively in their research. The first is accessibility to the whole package of international sociolinguistic scholarship, which is both physically and linguistically limited. For instance, the lack of English proficiency and the localization of China’s internet are problems for many. The second is a sociocultural environment where an authoritative voice is safeguarded but dissenting voices are discouraged, not to mention that one must have a conceptually and methodologically solid ground to challenge scholarly authority. It takes time for these situations to change. The native approach demonstrates some creativity in research but there is often a lack of critical thinking. The root of the problem lies in the principles to serve the state’s policies and have state funding as the sole source of support. Away from objectivity, some researchers might have looked for evidence only supporting state policies, while others might have found evidence incriminating state policies but have refrained from publishing for reasons of political correctness. However, to be politically correct may not be a specifically Chinese problem at all, though it is definitely more extensive there. Regardless, Chinese sociolinguists have greatly closed the gap in research, and expect to catch up with research in the international sociolinguistic community and eventually play a leading role 140
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as well. That may happen in future if they successfully overcome some of the aforementioned problems and integrate into the international sociolinguistic community without disengagement.
Note 1 The references use English titles only if they are provided by the database and searchable there. If not, romanization of Chinese is provided and followed by my English translation.
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12 SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES IN SOUTH ASIA Looking beyond the 60s Shobha Satyanath Overview of issues Looking beyond the sociolinguistics of the 1960s South Asia is a recent construction that arose essentially as a result of the Area Studies Programs in American universities starting in the 1950s to serve American interests in the region. The early sociolinguistic activities in the region were a direct outcome of the Area studies programs (though these have roots in the early 20th-century philological tradition as well in a limited sense). This is evident, for instance in Language diversity in South Asia (1960) jointly edited by Ferguson and Gumperz. However, those early essays also complicated the understanding of the region (see Satyanath, 2021). The models proposed by Fishman and Ferguson, and also early findings of Gumperz on both bilingualism and social stratification, though designed for the study of multilingual societies, were rightly contested by the local scholarship (Pandit, and de Silva).1 An uncritical summary of the developments of the 60s and early 70s in Language Diversity in South Asia by Shapiro and Schiffman (1975), reinforced a certain view of sociolinguistics, which almost came to be seen as a model of sociolinguistics for South Asia both in the subcontinent and beyond including the West. Persistence of the same can be seen more lately in Bashir (2016). In this chapter, I provide a critical appraisal of sociolinguistic activities from the region. A conscious attempt has been made to showcase the post-2008 research wherever available.
Diversity and history The present geography of Indo-Aryan (IA) languages in South Asia is a reminder of the intertwined histories of the regions of South Asia and beyond. The pre-colonial histories were marked by significant mutual exchanges, interactions and mobilities through trade, religion and culture, which gave rise to the present distribution of Indo-Aryan languages but also non-IA languages. The same were ruptured by the colonial intervention eventually resulting in new political geographies and newer socio-political equations. The regions of South Asia show several divergences, internal dynamics and tensions. But they also contain enough sensitivities of their pre-colonial cultural past, which mark them as distinct DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-15 146
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sociolinguistically from their western counterparts and their mono-cultural ideologies. All these regions excepting Sri Lanka (as Ceylon was separated from British India in 1802) and Afghanistan were part of the first Linguistic Survey of India carried out by Grierson (1903–1923). Despite the emergence of separate nation-states, it is a fact that Bengali speaking regions span India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. Likewise, languages continue from the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh into the contiguous Terai (plains) regions of Nepal. Nepali is widely spoken across India, especially in the sub-Himalayan region. Similarly, Punjabi spoken in Pakistan and India formed part of earlier Punjabi speaking provinces of the united India. The same is true of other northwestern IA languages, which got separated from their kin in India. Hindi is reportedly widely understood across the region, and the Hindi-Urdu political divide is well known. Indo-Burma, Indo-Bangladesh, Indo-Pak, Pak-Afghanistan, Indo-Tibet-China are historically linguistic continuums interrupted by new political boundaries. However, whether or not the new political geographies have hardened the earlier more permeable boundaries remains to be seen. Equally important is the question, whether the different ways of legislating diversity in the new postcolonial nations have altered the earlier relations that existed among languages on the ground. The presentation of the sociolinguistic activities in this chapter is mindful of the sociolinguistic settings within which these are situated. Being fully aware that the relevant research may not be evenly distributed across the region, this chapter is intended more as a useful resource on sociolinguistics in South Asia, focusing on both the research activities as well as a description of the relevant sociolinguistic settings, keeping in view both readers and researchers in the area. I begin with the two Island nations (Sri Lanka and Maldives) followed by Nepal and Bhutan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and finally India. Afghanistan is not covered due to the constraints on space and my lack of familiarity with the region. The focus is exclusively on IA, and on English, to a limited extent; the presence of other Indo-European languages (varieties of Indo-Portuguese) is just acknowledged. Further an attempt has been made to showcase the local scholarship, as much as possible.
Sociolinguistics across South Asia IA in the Indian Ocean: Dhivehi, Sinhala and Mahal Three languages of IA antiquity are spoken in the Indian Ocean within South Asia. These include Dhivehi in Maldives, Sinhala in Sri Lanka and Mahl/Mahal in Lakshdweep (northwest of the Indian Ocean or Arabian sea), India. Though more research is needed, these languages appear to be the result of the past mobilities in the trade corridor(s) which brought the outwardly moving IA languages (presumably Magadhan) and religions (Buddhism and Hinduism) in contact with the local Dravidian languages giving rise to new identities. Since then, these languages have been modified by various socio-political factors that affected the region. Due to the loss of contact with IA, the three languages have also reportedly diverged from IA while showing evidence of structural convergence with Dravidian. Their history, therefore, may not be very different from that of Bishnupriya (Satyanath and Laskar, 2009 and later in this chapter) except the factors of time depth and location. Each of the three island states, in turn, comprises several smaller Islands forming even smaller communities of speakers. Apart from the shared history, the geographic distances among the constituent islands within and across the three island nations and the degree of routine interactions among them are responsible for giving rise to the dialectal diversity reported in the region. While not much is written/accessible on Mahl (but see Joseph, 1995), there is linguistic literature available on Dhivehi and 147
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Sri Lanka, some of which is of potential interest to sociolinguistics and socio-historical linguistics. As for Mahl, it coexists with Malayalam in addition to Hindi and English, Sinhala with Tamil in several islands; Maldives has no reported appreciable Dravidian population.
Maldives Despite its long Buddhist past, Maldives today is an Islamic state. However, its national and official language is Dhivehi (written in Arabic script), which coexists with Arabic and English. 99% of its population speaks Dhivehi as the first language and 97% of the younger population is literate in it (Maldives Population and Housing Census, 2014). Apart from Dravidian and Arabic, Dhivehi has also been influenced from languages of South East Asia because of its location in the heavy traffic-shipping corridor. A third of its population lives in Malé, mainly as a result of internal migration, making it an interesting urban site for contact. The remaining population is distributed over more than 187 islands, a majority of which have less than 2000 population each, suggesting smaller communities with close social networks and ties. Only 1% of the islands have a population between 2000 and 5000 (Maldives Population and Housing Census, 2014). Much of the research on Dhivehi is based on available existing lexicons (e.g., Turner, 1969, 1971) and compiled word lists and sentences elicited from speakers or self-generated by speakers of Dhivehi. A primary source of research on Dhivehi is the National Centre for Linguistics and Research, Malé. The Centre has produced a multi-volume Dictionary, Grammars and information on dialects, all written in Dhivehi and, therefore, not easily accessible to the outside world. A second major source is doctoral dissertations probably under the South Asia studies programs. Some of the more recent among the available works include Maumoon (2002), Fritz (2002), Cain (2000), also Wijesundera et al. (1988), De Silva (1970), and Lum et al. (2021). The work on dialect geography of the region is impressionistic, partly supported by word lists. However, based on the available works a number of salient findings can be listed as follows: (a) The northern dialect spoken in Malé is considered the standard dialect. However, unlike Sinhala there is no significant divide between the spoken and literary Dhivehi. (b) A major dialectal divide reportedly exists between the northern and southern dialects. The southern dialects show maximum differences from the one spoken in Malé and other northern dialects. This appears to be due to the geographic distance; for the same reason, the southern islands seem to show greater similarity with Sri Lankan dialects due to their close proximity and greater contact with them (Wijesundera et al., 1988). (c) There is reportedly a regular cultural contact between Maldives and Lakshdweep through films and literature making the two languages (Dhivehi and Mahl) mutually intelligible with each other (Cain, 2000). (d) A contact variety of Dhivehi is reportedly spoken by foreigners. (e) There appears to be considerable variation in how spatial reference terms are used across Maldives. Use of spatial reference terms are reportedly undergoing a shift (Lum et al, 2021), which is attributed to factors such as urbanization and modernization. One finds greater use of geocentric frames (e.g., north/upriver/seaward) in rural Maldives and especially among older speakers, men, monolinguals, and fishing communities. Elsewhere, one finds greater use of egocentric frames (e.g., ‘to the left of the tree from my point of view’).
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Sri Lanka Sri Lanka has undergone a series of political changes that have affected its linguistic situation and the relations among its two principle ethno-linguistic groups, Sinhala and Tamil, over time. The shift from an inclusive language policy to a Sinhala-alone-policy in the 1950s resulted in the polarization of the Tamils and the Sinhalas. Likewise, official recognition of English as a link language and education in 1987 resulted in an increase in the use of English. Sri Lanka has been better researched as many of its scholars received linguistics training in American and British Universities during the 60s and 70s. Though linguistics as a full-fledged program is taught only in two universities, linguistics has been part of undergraduate programs from the beginning. Courses on language, society and culture formed part of the curriculum in 1960s and were spearheaded by De Silva, carried further by DeSilva’s student Dharamdas who also wrote a book on sociolinguistics in 1972 in Sinhala (Rajapakshe & Rajaratnam, 2021). Like India, sociolinguistics in Sri Lanka too has its roots in the early philological tradition (e.g., Karunatilake, 1969). Though sociolinguistic studies of speech communities are in their infancy in Sri Lanka, three important threads of research emerge from the existing studies: diglossia – the relationship between the literary and spoken Sinhala; Sinhala-English bilingualism; and language contact (the role of Dravidian in the restructuring of Sinhala, the rise of Portuguese contact varieties, and Tamil diaspora abroad).
Diglossia It has been reported that Sinhala has an opposition between a literary variety and a spoken variety (Gair, 1968, Paolillo, 1997, 2000). Apart from lexical differences, syntactic differences have also been reported between the two varieties. On the other hand, much of the local scholarship has suggested that in addition to the classical literary variety there is a new standard variety, which draws upon more synchronic resources. It, therefore, bridges the gap between the two varieties and is more flexible as it can be used in both formal and colloquial contexts to varying degrees (De Silva, 1967, 1974a, Sugunasiri, 1975). Furthermore, the varieties that form Sinhala diglossia are difficult to interpret in terms of High and Low in the strict Fergusonian sense (De Silva, 1967, 1974b).2 There is no correlation between the use of a High variety and one’s social ranking, and therefore, requiring the use of the High variety. The concept of prestige in Sinhala is not a social stratificational one (De Silva, 1967, 1974b). This is one of the most insightful and earliest observations on South Asia. The finding that the two varieties are not evaluated as High and Low, in terms of overt prestige, makes the Sinhala situation unlike the standard-non-standard divide in western contexts. This is in line with the research reported on Malayalam (Sunny, 2013) and in Satyanath (2015). These observations provide a fertile ground for further research. Furthermore, the Sinhala situation cannot be viewed just through the synchronic lense. It needs to be viewed in the context of a social historiography of the precolonial period on one hand, and of the postcolonial period, the rise of Sinhala nationalism, which led to the resurrection of a new high variety (Field, 2017, Dharamdasa, 1993), on the other. Sinhala sociolinguistics research needs to focus on observations of verbal performance in a variety of everyday contexts to produce a better understanding of the variation at play in the use of Sinhala. Further, a deeper investigation into the classical literary Sinhala may provide fresh insights into the context in which Sinhala and other Indian Ocean IA contact varieties developed, and their antiquity. This is necessary as its history as constructed is still largely utopian and is deep rooted in Sinhala nationalism which has ideologised Sinhala race, Sinhala language and Sinhala nation as one (Field, 2017). 149
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Bilingualism Research on bilingualism has more broadly focused on English bilingualism than on the overall linguistic situation involving Tamil-Sinhala. The fresh arrival of Tamil in the 19th and 20th centuries in Sri Lanka, for instance, gave rise to a new bilingualism involving Sinhala and Tamil. Even though Sinhala accounts for over 75% of its population (Census, 2001), Tamil and Sinhala speaking populations are not uniformly distributed across the island nation. There are regions that are overwhelmingly (>90%) Tamil or Sinhala. There are also regions where the groups are somewhat more evenly distributed. Likewise, in Sinhala-majority regions the strength of Sinhala varies from over 90% to 50%. Sociolinguistically, this provides an interesting situation to understand the nature of local bilingualism, the nature of the everyday verbal repertoires, relationships among languages and the impact of coexistence of the two languages on their structural distinctness amid ethnic tensions. Given the long history of ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka, it is a gap in the sociolinguistics research that needs attention. There are nevertheless some pointers that the existing research (Thampoe, 2017) provides. It is reported that Tamil spoken on the western coast of Sri Lanka (Negombo) has undergone significant lexical and grammatical shifts under the influence of Sinhala (Bonta, 2010, p. 310 cited in Thampoe, 2017, p. 24). The Sri Lankan situation provides a great opportunity to test the role of ethnicity in language variation and change in contact settings. Although it is not clear whether there existed two separate identities prior to the arrival of the Europeans in Sri Lanka, but reportedly there is evidence of the rise of two separate identities – one Sinhala and the other Tamil in the post 16th century (Coperahewa, 2007), paving the way for official recognition of the two languages and an awareness of separate ethnic identities. It is an open question whether the arrival of Tamils in the 18th century caused any further influence on Sinhala in specific regions.
English in Sri Lanka Though the history of English in Sri Lanka goes back to the British colonization, it grew majorly during the postcolonial period. In 1956, Sinhala became the official language replacing English. The official recognition for English as a link language came in 1987 (Mendis & Rambukwella, 2010). The first act strengthened the role of Sinhala in education at all levels and its use in every domain replacing English (Fernando, 1977). At the same time, privately funded schools escaped the purview of the government’s mother tongue education policy and English education continued alongside Sinhala medium education (Mendis & Rambukwella, 2010). The official recognition of English in 1987 further added a spurt in the use of English in administration, judiciary, media and education, and in the private sector. Thus, English education grew hand in hand with vernacular education. This is evident in the rise of a new hybrid code reported as early as in Fernando (1977) even before the Act of 1987. Subsequent studies (Senaratne, 2009; Priyanvada, 2007) too have pointed out the increased use of a hybrid code among youth. Senaratne (2009) further attributes this to the employment opportunities provided by the private sector for the youth (high school graduates). A growing presence of English in education and in everyday repertoire in various domains has further rendered the earlier literary-spoken divide futile, as college graduates hardly draw upon the literary Sinhala (Senaratne, 2009). The increased use of the mixed code has further obliterated the distinction between insertions and alterations. Drawing upon the speech of urban bilinguals, Priyanvada (2007) provides a turn-by-turn analysis of the language choices (switching) exercised by speakers during interaction. The study reveals four patterns involving the use of English and Sinhala, the use of which is reportedly not random. 150
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Other studies have focused on attitudes towards English, Sinhala, the mixed code, integrated English borrowings into Sinhala, and other world Englishes. The results vary across studies and seem mutually conflicting, which could be because of the methodology adopted in some of these studies. Using matched guise tasks and questionnaires, Senaratne (2009) suggests that both Sinhalized English and Sinhala are viewed negatively, though not the mixed code and English. Bernaisch (2012) tested Sinhala English with other World Englishes. The study suggests that each of the English varieties are evaluated positively, though British English received the highest scores followed by Sinhala, American and Indian English. There is a question mark on both the findings. It is strange that Sinhala should be viewed negatively. Likewise, while testing attitudes towards world Englishes, their usage needs to be contextualized. For instance, suitability of Englishes needs to be tested in specific contexts of news broadcast, entertainment, workplace, everyday contexts, and so forth. Jamaican Language Unit [JLU] (2005) on Jamaica suggests that though Patwa is favoured in most contexts, Standard English is favoured for news broadcast. There is only one study of language variation (Herat, 2005). The study explores linguistic constraints on variation in the use of copula/verb to be in the speech of 18 tour guides whom the author considers as habitual users of English. This is a skewed sample as it is not clear what kind of English schooling the speakers had had. Results suggest the role of several linguistic constraints. It is not clear to what extent this can be attributed to the absence of the copula in Sinhala itself. In contrast, Portuguese in Sri Lanka and similar Indo-Portuguese varieties have received relatively far greater attention, generally among western scholars (e.g., Cardoso & Acosta, 2021; Bakker, 2006). Varieties of Indo-Portuguese have been reported from the south West coasts of India where Portuguese has been influenced by the local languages such as Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, and Kannada along the coast; as well as from the eastern coast of India and Bangladesh. (Clements & Koontz-Garboden, 2002; Cardoso, 2021).
Nepal, Bhutan: language identity and conflict Bhutan Bhutan is home to 18 Tibeto-Burman languages with Nepali (or ‘Lhotshamkha’) as the only IA language spoken there (Van Driem, 1994). In addition, Hindi is also widely spoken and understood across Bhutan because of its proximity with India, popularity of Hindi television channels and movies in Bhutan and the fact that Hindi was the medium of instruction in Bhutan well into the 1960s (Kinley Dorjee, 2014). Nepali is confined to the southern part of Bhutan, bordering India and Nepal where it continues to be used in local administration and in broadcasting, though the new measures adopted by Bhutan with a view to discourage further migration from Nepal has resulted in discontinuation of Nepali from education in the late 1980s (Van Driem, 1994). Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan is widely spoken across Bhutan. Bhutan also recognizes all other languages through its census. As in the rest of South Asia, English plays an important role. People living in the border areas also reportedly speak the local languages of the bordering states of Assam and Bengal (Dorjee, 2014). As for sociolinguistics research, the only two studies available refer to variation in syllablefinal nasals and postvocalic rhotics (Wangchuk, 2018) and variation in complex consonant onsets (Dorjee, 2017) in Dzongkha. The only relevant study on IA (Nepali in Bhutan) is Lewicki (2011). The study is an attempt to understand the processes of identity formation, both ethnic and national, through language, among the Bhutani Nepalis, the refugees living in the United States (Philadelphia). The study also draws its data from Kathmandu and Darjeeling (India) to develop comparative 151
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perspectives. The findings suggest that these people identify themselves as Bhutani-Nepalis and also as Drukpa ‘people of Bhutan’ but not as Lotshampas ‘southerners’. They speak Nepali but do not identify themselves with Nepali spoken in Nepal (a symbol of Nepali national identity). They are aware of the differences in Nepali spoken in Bhutan and Nepal and many of them have also lived for many years in camps in Kathmandu. In addition to Nepali, many speak Hindi, English and Dzongkha, a few also speak one of the Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages (Tamang, Gurung, Rai, Limbu, or Magar etc.) or identify themselves as members of these communities (even if they don’t speak the language). The Nepalis in Darjeeling, in Nepal and in Bhutan identify themselves differently. The crux of the study is that, in a multilingual-multiethnic state such as Bhutan, people do not form a homogenous identity linguistically or culturally. Instead, people carry fluid identities which are contextually constructed, depending on how they position themselves. The Bhutani Nepalis do not carry any negative attitudes towards the Dzongkha language. They may have resentment towards Drukpa people, though. Their identities, it would seem, are not driven by language alone. This is despite being pressured to have ‘one-sided national and ethnic identities’. The findings run contrary to popular ideology (singular identities based on language or ethnicity) reflected in the works of several ethnolinguistic surveys carried out in Nepal which have been extensively used for mobilization of people in Nepal and across South Asia (Gellner, 1997 cited in Lewicki, 2011) against the national language policies.
Nepal Nepal is home to as many as 49 IA and 70 TB languages among others (CBS, 2011), both having a long presence in the region (Grierson, 1916). The number of TB speakers has been going up over the consecutive censuses along with an observable decline in Nepali speakers. The increase is largely fueled by the ethnolinguistic surveys and language activism (1960s–2008) resulting in fragmentation of existing identities into newer multiple identities, many of which may not be based on language but on a misconstrued/problematic notion of ethnicity. As amply pointed out, there does not exist a one-to-one relationship between language and ethnicity in Nepal. Nepali is the official language and all mother tongues are recognized as national languages of Nepal as per the present constitution. Nepali is spoken as the first language by over 40% of the population and as a second/additional language by the rest of the population suggesting extensive bilingualism with the state language. In addition, English, Hindi and Tibetan are also widely understood across Nepal. Several IA languages (e.g., Maithili, Awadhi, Bhojpuri etc.) common to both India and Nepal are spoken in the contiguous Terai (Foothills) regions by a significant proportion of the population (see Gautam, 2019). Kathmandu is the most urbanized area and is also the most multilingual area with the presence of a large number of IA and TB languages due to internal mobility. It is an important site for language contact between Nepali, Hindi, English and numerous community languages. Though generally studied with reference to language vitality, several studies (e.g., Gautam, 2020, 2019) suggest extensive vibrant multilingualism based on reported language use. Thakur and Yadav (2013), based on their study of multilingualism among Awadhi speakers in Kathmandu, suggest that, though use of Nepali is more evenly distributed among men and women, more men know English, Hindi and other languages. By and large these studies also suggest that the younger population is more outwardly oriented in their attitude towards language. The Linguistic Society of Nepal was established in 1979 and its first publication came out in 1980. A linguistic department was opened in the late 1990s, though some initial linguistic activities happened in collaboration with Asian Studies, Tribhuvan University and the SIL. It is interesting 152
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to note that, despite a long history of surveys, the publications of the Journal do not contain (with occasional exceptions) descriptions of dialects, as one would have imagined. Instead, most publications are essays in generative grammar. This is perhaps beginning to change now. Now I turn to the sociolinguistics research on Nepal. There are at least a few important studies that deserve attention. These include studies on variation and change in gender-marking in Nepali (Upadhyay, 2009) and politeness in Nepali (Upadhyay, 2003) and several studies on variation in ergativity marking (Poudel, 2008; Pokharel, 1998; Li, 2007; Verbeke et al., 2015; Lindemann, 2020). Upadhyay (2009) is among the rare sociolinguistic studies of variation and change in the Nepali speech community as well as on Nepali diaspora in Canada. The study examines variation in subject–verb gender agreement in non-honorific third person singular subjects, which inflect differently for masculine (INH gayo, NH gaye ‘he goes’) and feminine subjects (INH gayi, NH gayin ‘she goes’) showing gender agreement.3 Gender agreement also applies to modifiers which agree with their head Noun (mero father/meri mother; -o and -i for masculine and feminine respectively). There is an increasing tendency to neutralize the feminine gender marking by extending the masculine form to both the genders. Drawing data from 48 speakers representing male and female, young and older age groups, the findings suggest that fewer speakers consistently mark gender agreement (13%), whereas a large number of speakers either do not mark gender agreement (56%), or show variation in marking (42%). Younger speakers, both men and women are ahead of older speakers in neutralizing gender marking suggesting a change in progress both in gender marking as well as in attitudes towards growing gender parity. In both age groups, women are ahead of men in the shift away from gender marking, suggesting a change being led by women. This finding is in accordance with the broader finding of sociolinguistics (Labov, 1990). The remaining variation is explained in the context of the changing position of women in Nepali society. Increased access to education, employment, and participation in public life have empowered women. However, the entire society has not changed together. There are those who still endorse the traditional asymmetrical roles of men and women. Many endorse equality for their daughters but not similarly for their wives. This results in greater gender marking when referring to their wives but not when referring to their daughters. The variation in marking correlates, then, with a change or persistence of older attitudes towards women. The findings also indirectly suggest differences between rural and urban areas. This is an interesting and a novel finding which may very well hold good for other parts of South Asia as well. The findings indirectly coincide with Kumar (2021b) on Maithili in the neighbouring Indian state of Bihar which suggests a decline in honorificity marking across generations with women showing parity with men. Another study by Upadhyay (2003) shows that politeness is not a function of linguistic indirectness alone as suggested by studies of speech acts in western societies. Based on a study of Nepali directives in natural conversations in three settings (business, service and family) the study suggests that it is the morphological variation, rather than syntactic variation, which constitutes a significant linguistic device of marking honorificity and politeness in Nepali. Further, the selection of directives is motivated by those socio-cultural factors that are uniquely relevant to Nepali society.
Pakistan, Bangladesh and India Pakistan was born out of India in 1947 and Bangladesh became a sovereign nation in 1971 out of what was East Pakistan. Their history prior to 1947 is shared. The three formed part of the first Linguistic survey of India undertaken by Grierson and were part of the early books compiled on Linguistics in South Asia. 153
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Pakistan Pakistan is essentially home to Indo-Aryan languages though both Brahui/Brahvi (a Dravidian language) and Balti (Tibetan) have substantial presence. Urdu is the National language of Pakistan spoken by about 7% of the population, a figure that has remained fairly stable since the 1951 census. Punjabi is the most widely spoken language accounting for a little over 50% (as the first language) of the population in 1951. It has seen marginal decline since then, which may be superficial as Saraiki (previously viewed as a dialect of Punjabi) was excluded in subsequent censuses. English is the official language. Other languages include Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, Balti and many more with their numerous dialects. There has been a small increase in Pashto and Sindhi speakers in the last two census years. There is hardly any sociolinguistics activity visible in Pakistan (Dil, 1966a, 1966b/2016). Whatever sociolinguistically oriented activities are discernable, are fixated on politics of language, power and identity, language vitality, and some on English and mixing English with other languages. However, interest in sociolinguistics is evident in the paper titles presented at the ICLAP, 2016 and occasional research here and there. Some of the works worth mentioning, include a five volume survey of Northern Pakistan (O’Leary, 1992) sponsored by the SIL and the National Institute of Pakistan Studies (1986–1991), a re-analysis of Northern Pakistan (Kreutzmann, 2005), Burushaski (Munshi, 2006; n.d.)4 and a handful of assorted articles such as Rahman (1995, 2009), David et al. (2017), Manan et al. (2017), Alsaawi (2020), and Asif (2005). Next, we consider studies broadly referring to (1) politics of language and identity and (2) various miscellaneous issues. Asif (2005) analyses the reported patterns of language use at home among Siraikis in Multan. The study reports that Saraiki is spoken by millions of people in Multan. Urdu and English are learnt from schools and their usage generally correlates with one’s level of education. Likewise, people use Saraiki alone or Saraiki mixed with Urdu and English depending on one’s education level and exposure to Urdu and English. Greater use of Urdu and Urdu mixed with Saraiki and English is observed in urban households. However, there is a declining trend in the use of Saraiki alone with increase in age in both rural and urban areas (p. 263, Table 4.6). This reported observation could mean that Urdu and English being languages of education and work assume greater importance over Saraiki later in one’s life. The author, however, perceives the shift in the patterns of language use from Saraiki alone to its hybridization as an instance of language erosion. While the results are open to interpretation, the issue of language vitality in Pakistan is rooted in the realization that far greater resources are allocated for Urdu (spoken by a fraction of the population) than to any other language in Pakistan. Urdu perhaps also has very little utility in the international and business sector. Having said this, the results need corroboration with the observed language use. The author reported Saraiki being used by his consultants to him. Another study (Abbasa et al., 2020) using matched guise techniques (based on traits of personality, physical appearance, psychological strength, resourcefulness, and some negative traits) reported that Punjabi speakers view English and Urdu more favourably than Punjabi and that such negative attitudes may lead to language shift among Punjabi speakers. The study also reported that women tend to have relatively higher positive attitudes than men. The results are curious, given the size of the Punjabi speaking population and it is doubtful whether these results reveal attitudes towards language or something else. The results require an explanation and need to be revisited by including explanatory factors (economic factors) as well as testing emotional values associated with language (e.g., intimacy, sweetness). The authors did suggest demography as one of the important parameters that differentiated among the respondents. 154
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Manan et al. (2017) report that indigenous mother tongues enjoy strong roots and oral presence in informal private domains; they suffer from acute shrinkage in more literate domains. As a consequence, even though the respondents demonstrate sentimental attachment towards their languages as cultural and identity signifiers, they overwhelmingly support English and Urdu as their desired languages-in-education leaving their own mother-tongues marginalized. In contrast, David et al. (2017) report that in comparison with many other languages, Sindhis in Sindh province have done well. They fully maintain their language and behold sentimental affiliation with it as part of their cultural identity. This is attributed to the success of Sindhi in education and other vital domains. Huizinga (1994) analysed the possibility of introducing local languages such as Pashto, Balochi and Brahvi in Quetta (Balochistan). The study concluded that the policy of using local languages as a language of instruction in primary education, which is considered ideal in many western countries in particular, does not appear to be feasible in Balochistan for the time being. Rahman (1995) reports on two opposing views on Siraiki movement in Pakistan. One sees Saraiki as independent of Punjabi and as culturally and economically disadvantaged. The other considers Siraiki as a dialect of Punjabi and the Siraiki movement as a conspiracy to weaken Punjab. The language and identity politics in Pakistan is more complex than Nepal. One possibility is that it might be actually rooted in economic hardships and lack of non-uniform development, and that language has become the face of political discourse. There is a growing awareness among some people that only an increased allocation of resources for their languages can bring development. The other possibility is that despite accepting the idea of an Islamic nation, people never fully reconciled with Urdu as the national symbol. As many of the languages already have had a literary and cultural tradition of their own, endorsement of Urdu as a national symbol was not easily acceptable. This is evident in the words of Shahidullah ‘Musalmani Bangla can surely be a spoken dialect like such others in East Bengal, but that will not be our language of literature’ (Sarkar, 2022, p. 4). He not only opposed Urdu as a state language but also shaping of Bengali along religious line. Such voices emerged soon after the creation of Pakistan, and declaration of Urdu alone as the national language was opposed by Sindhi, Punjabi and Bengali. This resulted in granting greater recognition to Bengali, Punjabi and Sindhi initially which did not last long with the changing power politics in Pakistan. Creation of Bangladesh was an outcome of this dissatisfaction. This endorses the point made earlier, that in multicultural societies people have multiple identities, each one of which is important. Kirk (2017) explores the relationships between the humorous performance of language mixing and language ideologies in Pakistan. The study draws upon a comic television serial which involves the use of Punjabi and Urdu.
Recent research on English in Pakistan Manan et al. (2017) analysed the linguistic landscape in Quetta (Balochistan). The study reports that despite the fact that only a fraction of population speaks English, the local landscape extensively displays use of English though in a localized form. A bulk of the landscape is dominated by English transliterated into Urdu (69%). English alone accounts for a meagre 4%. Not a single example was found of Urdu alone or any other local language being used in the landscape. Arabic did appear occasionally, though. This, according to the authors, reflects appropriation of English, which is influenced by both global trends as well as local communicative needs, apart from readability, fashionability, marketability and expressability. 155
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Alsaawi (2020) reports that Imams in their sermons in the mosque (in Indonesia) where the audience is of Asia-Pacific origins (Pakistan, India and Indonesia) routinely switch between English and Arabic. It is suggested that this is seen as a means of increasing historical authenticity, exposing audiences to Arabic, overcoming a lack of easy equivalents in English. Additionally, Imams see the combined use of English and Arabic as socially and culturally salient, a means of uniting people in an otherwise often fractured world, or one frequently presented as such in the media. Rahman (2009) reports on the use of near-native (American or British) foreign English accents in call centres. Promotion of such accents in call centres results in commodification of language as well as discrimination. It also results in higher valuation of western Englishes over local Englishes.
Bangladesh Bangladesh is centred on the south delta of the Bay of Bengal, right in the middle of the erstwhile Bengal. Bengali spoken in Bangladesh represents partly northern and eastern dialects, but mostly southeastern dialects, the remaining dialect regions are in India spread over the Indian states of west Bengal, Assam and Tripura (as per Grierson’s dialect map, 1903; Satyanath, 2011). Over 98% of the Bangladesh population is identified as Bengali. There are also numerous smaller communities of Tibeto-Burman, Munda, Indo-Aryan and contact languages (e.g., Bishnupriya, Sadri) which together account for just over 1% of the total population (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, 2011). Bengali is the national and the official language written in Bengali script. English enjoys an important place in education, as is the case with the rest of the South Asia. Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan becoming a sovereign nation in 1971. A major reason for that was the language nationalism and its significant contribution to the study of language, literature, culture, and grammar since the 18th century. Modern sociolinguistics research by local scholarship has been scanty and is broadly focused on codeswitching, borrowing, language maintenance and shift and occasionally on dialect descriptions. A few papers, all published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics include Hamid (2022) on using southern theory to account for certain usages of English in Bangladesh; Jahan and Hamid (2019) on construction of elite identity through English medium education; Sultana et al. (2013) on linguistic and cultural stylization of space using online interactions among youth of Bangladesh and Mangolia, and Pichler (2006) on teasing as a resource for identity construction among adolescent British Bangladeshi girls. I would not discuss or comment on these papers as these are peripherally sociolinguistics and are easily accessible. I would instead highlight the salient points of some of the more relevant research and particularly those locally produced to provide a sense of sociolinguistic activities in Bangladesh. This includes dissertations produced abroad and locally published papers. Hamid (2005) investigates the maintenance of an eastern Bengali variety, ‘Sylheti’ among the Bangaladeshi diaspora in the UK. The study is valuable, both, in its findings and in its methodology and approach. It suggests that while studying a local variety (such as Sylheti), which coexists with a more standard form (Bangla/Bengali), it is important to know that speakers may not always correctly identify themselves. In this case, people overwhelmingly identified themselves as Sylheti but also as Bengali, which they did not speak.5 Therefore, to separate the identity of Bangla from that of Sylheti, it was important to allow respondents to think in terms of two different languages. Furthermore, the reported behaviour needed to be validated by actual observed behaviour to judge the mismatch between the two, if any. The study also identified differences between the language(s) used in the mother-tongue network as opposed to the friendship or other networks. 156
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This is a significant finding, as sociolinguistics generally believes that friendship networks might be sufficient to observe more casual speech. The study further suggests that the use of Sylheti and English in the family and friendship domains are indicative of language maintenance with additive stable bilingualism contrary to Fishman (1964). Furthermore, despite Sylheti having no prestige status or institutional support, it has more vitality than Bangla in the context of migrants in the UK and is maintained by adults and students. Use of English in the family domain along with other languages (Sylheti and Bangla) also challenges the social hierarchy. Other studies on multilingualism in Bangladesh (Hasan & Akhand, 2015) suggest that much of Bangladesh is bi- or multilingual which is contrary to the popular belief of Bangla monolingualism. English-Bangla mixing is common across social spectra, though it seems relatively higher, especially the use of English alternations as compared to insertions among those from higher strata of the society. Sultana (2012) reports on the emerging trend of English-Bangla-Hindi hybridisation among local youth in Bangladesh. The ‘trans-glossic’ repertoire, according to her challenges the one language–one identity discourse and the political discourses on pure Bangla which see mixing as pollution. However, the study leaves much to be desired both in terms of data and methodology. Bangladesh also has its own share of studies that suggest multilingualism kills diversity (Ghosh, 2017). This is even though the statistics quoted in the paper suggest that the speaker strength of various languages other than Bangla have gone up between 1991 and 2011. The concerns about diversity disappearing in South Asia seem to be increasingly based on the numerical strength of a community and the official status accorded to a language (however, see Hermon & Loh, 2010). A thesis (Das, in progress) on urbanisation and dialect contact in Dhaka will enrich our understanding of the current sociolinguistic situation in Bangladesh. In addition, there are dialect descriptions of specific structural aspects such as Ahmed (2016) on phonology of the Mymensingh dialect; Rashel (2011) on phonology of the Chatkhil dialect of Noakhali district; and Nabila (2010) on phonological and syntactic differences between the dialects of Brahmanbaria (Hindu Bengalis) and Sylhet districts. These are important resource for future researchers.
India Unlike the rest of South Asia, India is a multilingual federation (Satyanath, 2021). There is no national language; instead, Hindi and English serve as the official and associate official languages of the federation. Additionally, each constituent state of the federation has one or more official languages of its own. Delhi alone has four official languages. In terms of education India continues to follow a multilingual education policy, which is a continuation from the British days (Mahmood, 1895; Satyanath & Sharma, 2016). State legislatures are free to introduce any language in education. Earlier in this chapter, I demonstrated that the bulk of research across South Asia, though sociolinguistically oriented, focuses mostly on the politics of language and identity, diglossia, descriptions of bilingualism, and implications of bilingualism on language vitality. While India has its own share of such research, the past 20 years have seen a steady rise in mainstream sociolinguistics research. This research has focused mainly on language variation and change in a variety of sociolinguistic settings from across India, and is based on recorded speech data from large samples and quantitative techniques. This has expanded the existing research base, produced new findings, all of which have important ramifications for western sociolinguistics. In the following sections, I will discuss some of this research by organizing it in terms of themes. However, not all of this is 157
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on Indo-Aryan languages. The research also includes Malayalam, Angami and Ao. As the focus of the following sections is on themes, some non-IA salient research is unavoidable.
Gender, matriarchy and caste (Kerala and Bihar) The only sociolinguistic study that provides interesting pointers, as it compares women and men from patrilineal and matrilineal groups living in the same (urbanized) village in Kottayam district, Kerala, is Sunny (2013). The study sampled men and women from four groups including Nairs who practice matriarchy. Nair women have traditionally enjoyed a high public status (Gough, 1962). The four phonological variables she studied (voicing, weakening, deletion and nasal assimilation in voiceless plosives) showed gendered differences. The behaviour of Nair women on all the four variables consistently contrasts with that of men and aligns with the men from the three patriarchal groups. The ‘manly’ linguistic behaviours of Nair women also marks the Nair men as distinct not only from Nair women, but also from the other men in the village. Further, Nair women are ahead of other women on three out of the four variables in terms of frequency of use. There are studies on the languages of other matrilineal societies but these are not studied from the gendered point of view. These findings hold promise for the future of language and gender studies. Kumar (2021b) reports on caste in a Maithili speaking region of Bihar. The study sampled four caste groups (Brahmins, Bhumihars, Yadavas and Rams) supposedly differing in their social ranking. The study focused on variation in honorificity marking as reflected in verb agreement and on double object marking in Maithili. There are several important findings that emerge: There is a decline in overall honorificity marking among the younger age groups across castes. However, the overall rate of marking is still higher among the Brahmins and the Yadavas followed by Rams and Bhumihars. Though Caste is salient, a cross-tabulation with occupation suggests greater role of occupation as different occupational groups within a caste show different behaviour. Gender and education levels did not turn out to be significant. The findings are in accord with Pandit (1969), as both Kumar and Pandit suggest that caste is not an independent variable as it interacts with other social factors, in this case, occupation but surprisingly not with education and gender. The findings also suggest that despite the fact that the residential patterns in Bihar where the study was carried out are organized according to cast membership, caste is not equivalent to social class, nor does caste index a social meaning as social class does in the western contexts (for more details on caste and language in India see Satyanath, 2021). Both Sunny and Kumar also suggest a complex social organization comprising multiple factors. In Sunny, caste interacts with gender whereas in Kumar, it interacts with occupation.
Contact languages There are several contact languages in India that have appeared in the past few hundred years. These include Sadri, Bishnupriya, Nagamese, Nefamese, Dakkhini, and Konkani to name a few. All these are outcomes of contact with IA and other languages. In addition, contact zones exist everywhere, not only in the linguistic borders but within a given demography due to the coexistence of multiple languages. The aforementioned names are new identities with distinct labels. Speakers of these languages are generally multilingual. Having said this, Sadri is spoken in several States of India and known by multiple names (Kiran, 2003). It is one language with fragmented identities due to different labels. Therefore, its actual speaker strength is much higher. It is primarily an outcome of contact between various Munda, North Dravidian languages (from the ‘Tribal’ belts of Bihar, Bengal and Orissa) and the local IA languages in states such as South of Bihar (Presently 158
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Jharkhand), Bengal, and Orissa. Mundas and Dravidians in the region have also intermarried, adding further layers to the outcomes of contact. Sadri has also diffused to many places in India such as Assam (through the seasonal migratory tea workers). Changes in the Land Act and economic conditions compelled speakers from these non-agrarian communities to seek employment which brought them into greater contact with the Indo Aryan languages of Bihar, Bengal, Orissa, Chattisgarh, etc. Accordingly, the language varies in its characteristics depending on the languages it is in contact with the most. Though several people have reported on Sadri, Kiran’s (2003) description is based on natural speech data from several speakers. She has reported on variation in the use of the verb to be, quotative, and negative copula. Likewise, Dakkhini, which is confined to southern States, varies under the influence of local Dravidian languages. Nagamese in Nagaland is an outcome of the British annexation of Nagaland and placing it under Assam Province in the 19th century. The introduction of Assamese as a state language of administration and education resulted in Nagas coming in direct contact with Assamese on a large scale. Though some scholars (e.g., Sreedhar, 1974) have attributed Nagamese to early contacts between Nagas and Assamese, Satyanath (2018) suggests that it developed primarily in urban areas due to the increase in linguistic diversity (Satyanath, 2014; Satyanath & Dey, 2007). In Kohima town, where the presence of as many as 17 different Naga groups is attested, Nagamese serves as an important language of inter-group communication. Within the community, however, people use their own community languages. Nagamese is therefore a transformed version of Assamese, which shows several peculiarities. Satyanath (2018) reports on two ongoing changes in its firstperson pronouns (mui and mai ‘I’) and in possessive markers (-laga and -la) in Kohima town. By analyzing the two variables in the speech of 55 speakers from 10 Naga groups, the study suggests that though the younger generation shows a remarkable similarity in their behaviour, the changes have followed different trajectories among the older speakers. The state language, English, is not of much consequence socially. The findings also have implications for urban multilingualism and how identity is understood in such settings (Satyanath, 2016, 2018). Bishnupriya is another contact language, which emerged as a result of the arrival of Vaishnavism (a sect of Hinduism) from eastern to the northeastern parts of India during the 18th century (see Satyanath & Laskar, 2009, 2008). There are multiple languages involved in the contact and the resultant structures cannot be traced back to a single language. Satyanath and Laskar reported this as a result of intermarriages between local women (Tibeto-Burman) and the eastern IA men. The history was constructed using records of mobility as well as by deconstructing the lexicon of the language, and oral histories of the community from an area in Assam where one could still find Bengali and Meitei speaking villages adjacent to each other. Throughout Assam, Tripura, and Bangladesh, IA languages coexist with local TB languages. The findings suggest that though 70% of the lexicon of Bishnupriya comes from IA, their usage is distinctly marked by TB morphology. The presence of pronominal clitics, their locus of marking, classifiers and word order of NP constituents are some of the interesting characteristics of the language. The total strength of Bishnupriyas is about 60,000. The Bishnupriya language and identity is strong in many areas. It has been particularly involved in conflict with the Meiteis, which has further contributed to self-awareness. Satyanath and Laskar reported changes in the marking of pronominal clitics that have taken place in Bishnupriya and some ongoing changes.
Contact and outcomes There are several studies available on mobility caused by various factors including urbanization resulting in dialect contact and emergence of a new urban dialect. Dey (2010) studied the 159
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development of new town koine in Silchar (Assam) that was the direct fallout of the tea plantation activities in the Cachar district of Assam during 1856–1960. While most of the tea plantations have disappeared from Silchar, one or two still remain and are functional. The tea workers were drawn from several provinces especially from the undivided Bengal. Bengali (being the language of the Bengal presidency) and Hindustani (being the general lingua franca of British India as well as the language required to recruit people from the northwest and central provinces) were used as the plantation languages that eventually resulted in a Bengali based koine (Bagani Bengali ‘Garden Bengali’) and Hindustani ‘Garden Hindi’.6 Satyanath (1997) in her survey of language on Tea plantations reported the presence of several languages on plantations and at times the same language descriptions for different language labels. As plantations gave way to urbanization, the population of Silchar grew rapidly over time comprising mostly the descendants of the tea workers. Dey studied variation and change in labial and velar spirantization. Spirantization is also attested in Assam, but labial spirantization is unique to the region which has its roots in numerous Bengali dialects and other eastern IA languages. Using both real time and apparent time data, the findings suggest: (a) spirantization is historically attested only in a few Bengali regional dialects; (b) spirantization grew over time after its arrival in Silchar and extended to velar obstruents, not reported earlier; and (c) there is change in grammar in terms of constraints on spirantization. Most importantly, the change in spirantization is socially constrained and has seen several ups and downs during the last 100 years in Silchar. From being associated more with women initially and with those identifying themselves as Bengali, the change has now expanded to younger Hindustani speakers (Bhojpuri), whose ancestors hardly participated in the spirantization earlier. Although Silchar Bengali coexists with western Bengali (one of the state languages of Assam), Silchar Bengali is the local vernacular and is heard everywhere without any stigma attached to it. Standard Bengali can be heard more in educational domains and in other limited domains. Other relevant studies include Bhattacharya (2017b) and Imchen (2017). Bhattacharya’s study focused on several variables in Calcutta Bengali. Bengal witnessed significant westward mobility during the British period due to the economic decline of eastern Bengal and the rise of Calcutta as a new commercial and industrial centre. The westward mobility has made Calcutta speech very multidialectal. The eastern dialects that travelled to Calcutta have not disappeared, resulting in stable variation, for instance between alveolar and palatal sibilants. The variation is constrained by a number of linguistic and social factors. Other studies include Imchen (2017) on Ao Naga, which is not discussed here.
Dialect geography: geographic variation and change Unlike the western dialect geography with its primary focus on dialect regions in recent years (though Europe is an exception), dialect geography research in India presents both dialect regions (Satyanath on Bengal, Satyanath and Dey on Nagamese in Nagland, Kulkarni-Joshi on Maharashtra, Tirheja on Nagaland) as well as contiguous linguistic regions (Chahal, 2022; Satyanath, 2021; Kumar, 2021a; Kulkarni-Joshi, n.d.; Terhiija, 2015). A primary purpose of some of these surveys is to understand the diffusion of innovations in space; change in grammar of specific features in space, influence of contact and borders. These are some of the important ongoing surveys7 and for most of them reports are available in the form of dissertations, presentations and paper publications. Kumar (2021a) includes mapping of specific grammatical features across Bihar as well as in the neighbouring regions of Uttar Pradesh where Bhojpuri is spoken. Using natural speech data from an age-graded sample, the study has so far mapped the copula across five Bihari languages. One of the objectives is to see whether the various Bihari languages form a 160
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continuum or have sharp boundaries. The findings suggest the presence of both. However, shared similarities also show differences in social dynamics. This work is an exercise in social dialect geography. Chahal’s (2022) focus is on a comparative dialect geography of IA in South Asia. She has so far mapped retroflexion of nasals and liquids across IA in India (Chahal, 2022) using available historical texts, to which synchronic speech data is being added. Satyanath (2011) mapped diffusion of sound shifts pertaining to sibilants and palatals in the Bay of Bengal region during the 19th–20th century using available historical texts. Satyanath (in press) maps change in grammars of Assamese spoken in three different states. She has so far focused on diffusion of classifiers from Assamese into Nagamese (Nagaland) and Nefamese (Arunachal Pradesh) as well as across Nagaland (Satyanath & Dey, 2007). Additionally, she has analysed the variation and change in various grammatical properties of Nagamese and Assamese (Satyanath, 2014). The importance of these projects lies in the fact that they allow us to revisit some of the historical puzzles by bringing in spatial dimensions. Mesthrie (2022) is another example of similar research on sibilants in Gujarat and western India. Also see related publications such as Arsenault (2017) and Borin et al. (2021) with somewhat different goals. Additionally, the aforementioned works are quantitative in nature and are interested in deeper analysis of structural constraints as well as social dynamics and the histories of the regions. Kulkarni-Joshi (n.d.) has an ongoing state funded project to document dialects of Marathi. Her work includes mapping specific grammatical features using both synchronic and diachronic approaches. Some of the work has focused on contact among dialects. Much of her work on dialect geography is still not available in the public domain, however, see Kulkarni-Joshi and Kelkar (2020). The most extensive work on surveying Marathi dialects to date is a seven-volume work by Ghatage (1963–1973) followed by Dhongde (2013).
Multilingualism Sociolinguistic research on multilingualism is still limited despite numerous works entitled ‘multilingualism’. Moving beyond the research on language maintenance and shift more recently a substantial body of research has focused on contact and convergence in the state of Maharashtra. This includes Kulkarni-Joshi’s work on Kupwar (Kulkarni-Joshi, 2016, 2008) where she has contested some of the findings of Gumperz and Wilson (1971) with respect to structural outcomes of convergence in the region. Her other work on contact and convergence in the region include KulkarniJoshi (2012, 2014, 2015) much of which focuses on the Dravidian substratum in Marathi. Moving beyond convergence, there is also research that is embedded explicitly in multilingual contexts. Some of this refers to acquisition of specific variables among children in bilingual families. This includes Michael’s (2015) work on cross-generational change in Malayalam phonology (nasals) among migrant families in Delhi, where Malayalam coexists with Hindi and English in family and outside. However, the change is not attributed to the influence of Hindi. A comparison with the homeland younger Malayali (Malayali dominant, if not exactly monolingual) speakers of similar age groups suggests presence of similar variation (developmental) attested in the use of nasals in their speech as well. The findings underscore the need for caution, when researching bilingual settings, to avoid attributing all change to contact. Acquisition of Hindi gender among Bangla speakers in Delhi (Bose, 2019) suggests that in Bengali-dense neighbourhoods children do not fully acquire the Hindi grammatical gender even by the age of 13. K. Nath (2022) examines acquisition of classifiers among Assamese speaking children by drawing data from Assamese and mixed family backgrounds. Speech of children is compared with that of adults to account for differences across children. Study of Kohima town (Satyanath, 2018) examines variation in 161
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Nagamese by sampling data from 10 different Naga linguistic groups. Another study (Satyanath, 2016) explores multiple identities in multilingual Kohima using matched guise technique. Laskar (2011) studied variation in tense, mood and aspect markers among Bishnupriya-Bengali bilinguals in Assam. The two languages share the same markers but differ in terms of their functions. The speakers seem to be aware of such differences, which are reflected in the grammar that appears at the switch-points. A switch from one language to the other results in speakers overshooting the target by exaggerating the difference. There are more studies such as S. K. Nath (2022), which provide an interesting account of variation in mid vowels in Assamese. Sociolinguistics of multilingualism is still evolving in India, and it requires a paradigm shift.
English in India8 India has witnessed a continuous rise in favour of English education resulting in the widespread use of English across social spectra and mutual crossing of English and local languages across digital and print media and in everyday repertoires. Around the 1970s, English first emerged as the language of socialization from its earlier role of language for specific purposes (Satyanath & Sharma, 2016). English education might have replaced literacy in regional languages in a big way, but it has not weakened the local languages. Instead, use of Hindi and other languages in Delhi and elsewhere has strengthened. Contrary to the popular misperception (see e.g., Sahgal, 1983; Chand, 2009, 2011; Domingo, 2020) and given its social penetration, English is not the language of the elite. Given the strength of its population, English in India is rapidly undergoing changes. Some of the prominent ones include changes in its vowels, especially GOAT and NORTH, but also KIT which are being innovated and being led from below by those with vernacular/bilingual medium schooling. Equally important are changes in patterns of vowel reduction which are not in accord with the western Englishes (not that there is no less variation among British Englishes as evident in dictionaries and history of English lexicography). Such changes are attested in Englishes across Asia due to the local changes in the prosodic patterns affecting syllabification among other factors (Sharma, 2010). Yet another study has shown that s-voicing in English seems to be conditioned by the following segment across morpheme boundary rather than by the preceding segment unlike the western English prescriptive norm (Bhattacharya, 2017a). The a priori assumptions about the status of English in India continue to complicate the understanding of English in India. It produces a deficit view of English where local structures are compared with the western standard Englishes and the deviances are generalized. On the other extreme side, Domingo (2020) makes an interesting claim on change in vowels, except for some of the assumptions that are problematic. This includes the assumption of ‘lifelong speakers of English’ which he typically finds in South Delhi and among those holding high rank jobs in Defense services which echoes the popular imaging of English as a language of the elite. This leads to another problematic assumption that present English(es) somehow represent(s) an unbroken continuity of colonial English in the speech of the so-called elites. Such western gazes to English perpetuate misrepresentation of the local ecologies in which English grew. Several pieces of available research on English in Delhi (Satyanath & Sharma, 2016; Sharma, 2010, 2017; Bhattacharya, 2017a) militate against these naïve assumptions and therefore by extension, the findings themselves that are based on such assumptions.
English in South Asia As discussed in the preceding sections, the overall picture of English across South Asia is largely similar. A lot has already been written on English in South Asia in several handbooks of world 162
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Englishes, though specific studies documenting the growth of English in Asia are lacking (see Satyanath & Sharma, 2016); similarly, studies of speech communities on variation and change are rarely reported. Excepting a handful of works such as Sahgal (1983), Chand (2009), Sharma (2010, 2017), Bhattacharya (2017a, 2017b), Satyanath and Sharma (2016), Domingo (2020) on English in India, substantial work on English has appeared on South Asian Diaspora especially in the UK. Some of the well-known works include Sharma (2021, 2016, 2014, 2011, 2005), Sharma and Rampton (2015), Wormald (2016), Baranowski (2017), Baranowski and Turton (2020), Cheshire et al. (2011), and Kerswill et al. (2008). The findings of these works are well known and hence need not be repeated here.
Summing up I have shown that each of the regions of South Asia however big or small holds considerable diversity and complexity, and promise for future research. India, which is better researched sociolinguistically, has produced a cumulative body of knowledge on the study of multicultural societies. These societies are shaped by the presence of multiple ethno-linguistic groups, urbanization, increased mobility and several local factors such as clan (Suokhrie, 2016, 2022), caste, matriarchy, etc. Clan, caste and matriarchy do not quite work like social class, or gender in western patriarchy; likewise, mobility and urbanization produce outcomes, not all of which are in accord with those reported in better researched western contexts. Further, the relations between literary/standard/ official languages and vernaculars can hardly be understood in terms of prestige or high and low, thereby rendering the standard-non-standard oppositions irrelevant or adding a new dimension to them (Satyanath, 2022). These settings have also contributed to several newer linguistic variables. On a global level, the research has expanded the existing knowledge base by contributing newer research from diverse settings, but its findings have implications for western sociolinguistic theory in many specific areas. On a more local level, an uncritical use of the existing western models, both the older ones such as Fishman, Ferguson or even Gumperz and Emeneau, as well as the current models and anthropological theories, are bound to lead to misleading results in multicultural South Asia and similar settings elsewhere.
Acknowledgements The author gratefully acknowledges the support extended by Priya Chahal, Dipanwita Das, Ranjan Kumar, Kaushika Nath, and Saurabh Nath while gathering materials for the chapter and their comments. Thanks also to Ayesha Saeed for her comments on the chapter.
Notes 1 Readers are guided to Satyanath (2021) for more details. 2 De Silva was a contemporary of Prabodh Pandit (India) and the two have provided valuable insights into South Asia on the relations among languages in the context of bilingualism and diglossia. These insights refute the simplistic observations made by western scholars. Recall, Gumperz modified his position on bilingualism and caste following Pandit’s landmark studies on Saurashtrians in Gujarat (1972) and caste in Gujarat (1969). The point that De Silva was making was that regardless of the divide that may exist between a literary and spoken form, the relationships between the two are not interpretable in terms of prestige, social ranking and therefore High and Low. See Satyanath (2021). 3 INH: Intense non-honorific; NH: non-honorific. The two terms refers to two degrees of non-honorificity. In more popular literature, degrees of honorificity are marked with numerals. However, the use of ‘intense’ perhaps carries further meaning and might be a superior representation.
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Shobha Satyanath 4 Munshi (2006) and her ongoing archival work on Burushaski (Munshi, n.d.) spoken in India and Pakistan are useful resources for sociolinguistics. 5 In India, too, it is common among dialect speakers of Hindi to routinely identity themselves with the state language, Hindi. The reasons are not low prestige of the dialect but that the speakers do not perceive them as distinct, unless specifically pointed out by an insider. 6 However, outside the tea plantations, such names are not used. For the locals it is the local Bengali. Some linguists (more generally, non-sociolinguists) tend to identify it as ‘Sylheti’ assuming it as the language of East Bengal. But this is a misnomer, as several regions contributed to the population of Assam. 7 While the research on Marathi is an endeavor of Kulkarni-Joshi and her ongoing and completed projects on Maharashtra; the remaining surveys mentioned are the projects in progress by Satyanath and her students. These are located in Eastern India, Assam, Nagaland, Bihar and IA across India. 8 Note that the research reported in this section is based on Delhi and no attempt is being made to overgeneralize it to English elsewhere in India, even though some of these findings might very well be pan-Indian (urban) in nature to a certain extent. The findings are based on a large survey of 70 families from Delhi spanning several generations including those born during 1900 (and earlier) and 2000; their history of schooling and English use.
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13 SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES IN SOUTH ASIA G. Balasubramanian and S. Arulmozi
Introduction South Asia is identified as a linguistic area as this region shares certain linguistic features (Hock & Bashir, 2016, pp. 241–374) due to contact across genetically different languages. Gumperz (1969) wrote a brief paper on ‘Sociolinguistics in South Asia’ outlining the Indian scenario of social dialects, superposed varieties, language use and convergence. The linguistic diversity of this region continues to be focus point for scholars (Ferguson, 1992; Masica, 1992; Nakassis & Annamalai, 2020). The Dravidian family is identified with 27 languages and many dialects grouped under different languages present in India. Brahui is spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tamil speakers living in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka are believed to have migrated 2000 years ago from their homeland in India, and there is recent migration too during the 19th century.1 Kurukh speakers in Bangladesh and Nepal are considered to have migrated from Chota Nagpur region of India some 200 years ago. Apart from the migrations to neighbouring countries, speakers of different Dravidian languages migrated to many parts of India, particularly to the neighbouring states from the 16th century onwards and become settled linguistic minorities. After the linguistic reorganisation of Indian states, the border areas were also left with linguistic minorities. Recent migrations of Dravidian language speakers to cities like Mumbai and Delhi also constituted linguistic minorities of these languages in many states. The Dravidian languages are in contact with Dravidian and other language families in India and in the neighbouring South Asian countries. The sociolinguistics of Dravidian languages generally covers social dialects, linguistic variation, diglossia, language use in different domains, contact situations, bilingualism and multilingualism, language maintenance and shift, convergence, code-switching, endangerment, language planning and so on.
Status of Dravidian languages The Dravidian languages are of SOV type, with the following major characteristics (based on Krishnamurti, 2003, pp. 27–30): (a) Only one finite verb per sentence (b) Modifier always precedes modified DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-16 170
Sociolinguistics of Dravidian languages in South Asia
(c) Nominals are inflected for case (d) Cases and postpositions follow nouns (e) No prefixes or infixes (f) Suffixation as the usual process (g) Morphemes are strung together in agglutinative fashion (h) Gender and number are interrelated categories (i) Gender-number-person agreement is expressed by finite verbs (j) Inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns (k) Two tenses – past and non-past (l) Voice contrast absent in the Proto-Dravidian stop series (m) Alveolars and retroflexes only in medial position Genealogically, the Dravidian languages are divided into three groups viz. South Dravidian consisting of Tamil, Malayalam, Irula, Kurumba, Kodagu, Kota, Toda, Badaga, Kannada, Koraga and Tulu; Central Dravidian consists of Telugu, Gondi, Konda, Kui, Kuvi, Pengo, Manda, Kolami, Naikri, Naiki, Parji, Ollari and Gadaba and Northern Dravidian comprises of Kurux, Malto and Brahui. Recognising new dialects and reclassifying certain dialects as independent languages is an ongoing scholarly activity. According to Steever (1998/2000, p. 10), ‘for South Dravidian, Bellari, Burgunḍi, Kaikuḍi, Koraga, Korava, Kuruba, Sholega, Yerava and Yerukula have been reported; for South-Central Dravidian, Āwē, Indu and Savara. Conversely, certain dialects of Goṇḍi, Kolami, Kuṟumba and Kuṛux could prove, under closer inspection, to be independent languages’. Differentiating between language and dialect has been a long-standing preoccupation starting from Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1903–1928) to the latest Indian Census enumerations (2011). This issue may cause controversy, as is evident in the case of Dravidian Languages. Government surveys and linguists differ in their criteria and policies for identifying or listing of the languages (and dialects). Thus, according to the 2011 census, the number of Dravidian languages is 17 as it considers only mother tongues with a population of 10,000. Toda, for example, is not reported as an independent language in the 2011 census. from A related problem in identifying and collating varieties is that community names for the same language may vary in different locations, especially, to minor languages spoken by people in tribal areas. For example, Kurux is identified as Uranw in West Bengal while in Nepal it is also given the name Dhangar/Jhangar. Among the 22 recognised in the Eighth schedule languages of the Indian Constitution, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu are from the Dravidian stock. Gondi, Kurux and Tulu are in the queue with the 38 other languages demanding recognition in the Eighth schedule of languages. A new category of languages was accorded recognition as Classical languages by the Government of India viz. Tamil (declared in 2004), Kannada, Telugu (declared in 2008) and Malayalam (declared in 2013). The Dravidian family embraces four major languages represented by 23,78,40,116 speakers, according to Census of India 2011, viz. Telugu (8,11,27,740), Tamil (6,90,26,881), Kannada (4,37,06,512) and Malayalam (3,48,38,819) of the total population of India. Tulu has a population of 18,46,427. The population of other language speakers are variously presented in the 2011 Census. However, the following needs special mention: As per the Census of India, 2011, the languages Badaga, Kuruba/Kurumba are grouped under the broad language name ‘Kannada’ as variants (p. 38); Pania and Yerava are grouped under Malayalam (p. 46); Irula/Irular Mozhi, Kaikadi, Korava, Yerukala/Yerukula are grouped under Tamil (p. 64) even though linguists hold these to be independent languages (Krishnamurti, 2003).
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Kannada is the official language of Karnataka, Malayalam, the official language of Kerala, Tamil the official language of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, while Telugu is the official language of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Telugu and Kurux are also recognised as the State languages of West Bengal along with other languages. Similarly, Kurux is given the status of an additional official language in the State of Jharkhand. Tamil is also recognised as an official language of Sri Lanka.
India Social dialects The study of sociolinguistics proper began in India around the 1950s (Satyanath, 2021), though Tamil caste dialects had been studied by Jules Bloch in 1910 and Tulu by L.V. Ramaswamy Ayyar in 1932. According to Shapiro and Schiffman (1975, p. 200), we owe to Bloch (1910), ‘caste and dialect are associated, that there are three main socially determined Tamil dialects, that the middle castes exhibit greater variation than low castes’. These claims initiated the serious study of social dialects in South Asia. The sociolinguistic studies during 1960 to 1990 were very intense while the later period did not have that much vigour due to the overall academic environment. Works covering many aspects of sociolinguistics were carried out in the four major languages viz. Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. On the other hand, the minor or the so-called ‘tribal’ languages are studied from the point of view of language contact and endangerment. Early studies on the castes of Kannada by McCormack (1960) divided Dharwar Kannada speech into three as Brahmin, Non-Brahmin and Harijan. Bhat (1968) too noted the differences between Brahmin and Non-Brahmin, and Harijan castes. Bright (1960) compared two caste idiolects and found the difference between Brahmin and Okkaliga, non-Brahmin caste, and observed the dimension of the other social variable called literacy in linguistic variations. Shanmugam Pillai (1965) exhibited caste isoglosses in Tamil based on kinship terms. Studies also show that the change of society brings change in language attitude and consequently the society acquires new linguistic behaviour (Ramanujan, 1968; Ullrich, 1992, pp. 113–130). Pandit (1972, 1975) refuted the earlier claims (Bright, 1960; Shanmugam Pillai, 1965; Bhat, 1968) that caste is the exclusive social variable in speech of the Indian societies. According to him caste ranking and speech variation could not adequately explain the complex structure of variation (1972, p. 80). Instead he provided evidence that speech variation is conditioned by number of other parameters such as age, gender, education, urban, rural and so on. Pattanayak’s (1975) article ‘Caste and Language’ argued that caste is continuously changing due to education. His claims sparked a series of debates among scholars like Neethivanan (1975), Somasekharan Nair (1975) and many others, regarding whether caste can be considered as a social variable to correlate with linguistic variation or not (Karunakaran & Sivashanmugam, 1981). Other studies take religion as a relevant variable along with caste (Girish, 2003). Annamalai (2001, pp. 40–41) observes that caste dialects are limited to a particular region with features specific to individual castes and caste as a social variable plays lesser role in urban than in rural areas. Certain linguistic features characterised by caste become identity markers in rural areas. Following the early work of Brown and Gilman (1972), several studies were carried out dealing with pronouns and power relations in Dravidian languages (e.g. Bean, 1978 and Perumalsamy, 1991). Krishnamurti (1992) constructed a four-point scale of parameters for selecting a particular second person address form by a Telugu speaker. Balasubramanian (1999) identified how the social
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hierarchy works in traditional villages through exploiting the reciprocal and non-reciprocal use of the second person pronouns and pseudo-kinship terms as address terms.
Multilingualism The Indian Census has provided a useful analytical resource in their Language Atlas of 2011. It contains valuable comparative statement (p. viii) indicating the rate of Indian bilingualism and trilingualism, based on successive Census Reports from 1961 (see Table 13.1). Though the preceding figures represent all the languages of India, this degree of multilingualism is also applicable to Dravidian languages. The Atlas (2011, p. 146) also gives figures for bilingual speakers in the main Dravidian language states (see Table 13.2). From the preceding statistics, the average percentage of bilinguals in the states where Dravidian languages predominate is 31.88%, which is much above the national average of 26.01%. Almost one-third of the total population in these states is comprised of bilinguals. Although India is known for its patterns of stable bilingualism (Pandit, 1979), tribal bilingualism seems less stable. Annamalai (2001, p. 65) calculates from the 1981 to 2005 censuses that half the tribal population in India shifted their mother tongue identity. Table 13.1 Rate of Indian bilingualism and trilingualism 1961 1971 1981
9.70% 13.04% 13.34%
1991
19.44%
2001
4.74%
2011
26.01%
Trilingualism based on last three census reports 1991
7.26%
2001
8.51%
2011
7.10%
Source: from Language Atlas of 2011, p. viii
Table 13.2 Rate of bilingualism in the Dravidian language states State
Total population
Percentage of bilinguals
Andhra Pradesh Karnataka Kerala Tamil Nadu Puducherry
8,45,80,777 6,10,95,297 3,34,06,061 7,21,47,030 12,47,953
25.52% 39.70% 24.44% 28.30% 31.43%
Source: from Language Atlas of 2011 p. 146
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Contact and convergence One of the important characteristic features of Indian multilingualism is the extent of contact and convergence. Emeneau’s (1956) epoch-making paper ‘India as a Linguistic Area’ presented evidence for many shared features such as onomatopoeic and echo words, the SOV word order, retroflex consonants, etc. among Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda languages. Data have been added through revisit papers on ‘India as a Linguistic Area’ (Emeneau, 1974; Abbi, 2012). Gumperz and Wilson (1971) conducted an important study: ‘Convergence and Creolization: A Case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian Border in India’. They argued strongly that centuries old co-existence of bilingualism among the Kannada, Urdu, Marathi and Telugu speakers of Kupwar village of Maharashtra resulted in common converged features with a system of inter-translatability. Kulkarni-Joshi (2015, 2016) revisited the Kupwar linguistic situation 40 years after Gumperz and Wilson’s study. Drawing on fresh data collected in Kupwar and other Marathi-Kannada bilingual villages in the border region, she contests the claim for complete isomorphism/intertranslatability in the contact varieties (Kulkarni-Joshi, 2016). Her study demonstrates that the long-standing bilingual situation had indeed introduced variability in the local speech varieties. However, her research suggests that Gumperz and Wilson’s claim for isomorphism may well have been at least partially an artefact of his methodology, which relied on a chain of translations involving informants/consultants for the languages in contact. Furthermore, as an offshoot of the privileging of state official languages in the last 40 years, the local contact varieties are shifting towards standard Marathi and standard Kannada. With regard to tribal languages, Reddy (2005, 2016) presents convergent features due to coexistence of Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and the Munda family of languages. Bilingualism due to contact between the related languages of Dravidian family and with languages of other families is very common through the phenomenon of migration as well as of language co-existence in border areas. Studies carried out specifically with reference to major languages such as Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu and Tamil found unidirectional convergence in minority languages towards these more dominant languages. Data collected from the Tamil linguistic minority group consisting of Brahmin, non-Brahmin and Christian caste groups in Bangalore, showed that ‘the three groups perceive the importance of maintaining Tamil language as an important token in the maintenance of Tamil identity and solidarity’ (Bayer, 1986, p. 104). In a similar study, ‘Convergence and Language Shift in a Linguistic Minority’, Mohan Lal (1986) compared the language used by two Tamil speaking communities, viz. Mudaliyars and Iyyangars and found variation in the maintenance of Tamil between these two communities. He attested that Mudaliyars maintained Tamil in all domains possibly because of their positive attitude towards Tamil. On the other hand, the Tamil language of Iyyangars has more linguistic assimilation towards Kannada as they have neutral attitude towards their mother tongue, Tamil. Such studies indicate that the characteristics of bilingualism and multilingualism in the four southern states of India are similar.
Diglossia After the seminal study of diglossia by Ferguson (1959), Tamil Diglossia has been a subject of interest among scholars like Shanmugam Pillai (1960), Deivasundaram (1981), Britto (1986). It is claimed that Kannada (Bright & Ramanujan, 1972/1980) Telugu (Radhakrishna, 1980) and Malayalam (Gopinathan, 1980) are also diglossic languages. Sridhar (2008, p. 235) gives 174
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a historical account of the contact between Dravidian Languages and Sanskrit and Prakrit and the features of convergence of Indo-Aryanization or Sanskritisation in Dravidian languages which lead to a diglossic situation. A notable exception to the rule of diglossia was Tamil which opposed the Sanskritic features since the period of Tolkaappiyam, the earliest extent Tamil grammar. It is also observed that the two varieties of Tamil (classical and colloquial) are getting closer and converging, thus calling into question the rigidities of the original diglossia formulation (Annamalai, 2011, pp. 46–55).
Standardisation and modernisation Issues related to standard and non-standard varieties in Indian languages are dealt with briefly by Krishnamurti (1979). With regard to Telugu, Krishnamurti stated that the speech of the educated middle classes of Central Andhra had been widely used as the standard form of Telugu. He also pointed out the difficulties posed for standardisation by variation in such middle-class speech. Such variation within the standard language is also applicable to other Dravidian languages. Ramamoorthy (2000) evaluated the modernisation efforts in Tamil by taking into consideration prose development, vocabulary expansion and script reformation. The process of vocabulary development involves Sanskritisation in Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. In Tamil such development occurs on the basis of ancient literature, and thus involves a measure of revivalism. Borrowing from English is common to all languages (D’souza, 1986; Sridhar, 1992) as another source of language development and modernisation. Some of the problems and proposed solutions regarding Indian multilingualism are treated by Dua (1985) and Annamalai (2001).
Language policy During the 12th to the 14th September 1949 the Constituent Assembly of India debated and resolved to have Hindi as official language of India and English as associate official language. The Union Government takes initiatives at different points of time to implement the official language Hindi in a full-fledged way and the oppositions for ‘imposition of Hindi’ is also sprouting particularly from Tamil Nadu state. Srivastava (1979) gives an account of such movements. A three-language formula was approved as part of the National Policy on Education adopted in Indian Parliament 1968. As per this formula, ‘the study of a modern Indian language preferably one of the southern languages apart from Hindi and English in the Hindi speaking states, and of Hindi along with the regional language and English in non-Hindi speaking states’ was a desideratum (Viswanathan, 1999, p. 94). The formula was strictly implemented in the southern states, except for Tamil Nadu and Union Territory of Puducherry where it was not implemented at all. However, in north India, especially, the provision of teaching a south Indian language was not honoured (Viswanathan, 1999, pp. 89–108). The language policy for India at Union level and States are governed by several factors, notably the complexities of multilingualism (Fishman, 1972; Dua, 1991), and of educational issues (Mallikarjun, 2002). Advocates for multilingualism like Annamalai (2003, p. 130) argue poignantly that ‘like the land or forest, language is a resource; the rights over it must reside locally and the functions of it must be vitalized locally’. This voice is loudly heard by major supporters of Dravidian languages. 175
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Language endangerment Whereas there was interest in the smaller Dravidian languages previously, recent scholarship has specifically focussed on language endangerment. Abbi (2016, p. 633) provides a list of endangered languages in four states, with approximate numbers per language given in brackets as follows. (a) Kerala: Ara Nandan (200), Moopan (3000), Maduga (3370), Paliya (9520). Mannan is spoken both in Kerala and Tamil Nadu by 7850 speakers, Eravallan is spoken both in Kerala and Tamil Nadu by 5000 speakers. (b) Karnataka: Hakkipikki2 (8414), Kutiya (2800); Toda (1560) both in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, is considered vulnerable due to heavy language shift to the State languages. (c) Tamil Nadu: Jenu Kurumba (3500), Kurumba (5498), Malasar (7760) and Kota (1186) spoken in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. (d) Odisha: Two languages, Manda (4040) and Pengo (2000), are highly endangered. Introducing education in State languages and ignoring the mother tongue medium has impeded the growth of these languages. Reddy (2001) provides a consolidated account of the Dravidian tribal languages up to 2000. Scholars have rightly criticised the Census of India for not even listing the name (and the number of speakers) of any language spoken by less than 10,000 people, arguing that this policy is particularly detrimental to the tribal languages (Bhattacharya, 2002; Reddy, 2006, p. 215). The study by Gnanasundaram et al. (2012) shows a shift in the use of Betta Kurumba spoken in Karanata and Tamilnadu towards the dominant languages, Kannada and Tamil respectively. They observed that the spread of literacy in the dominant language is the main catalyst towards the loss of tribal mother tongues. Studies also found out akin to UNESCO’s Language Vitality and Endangerment document (2003) that there is a reduction of the indigenous population, lack of intergenerational transmission, migration of the population to the urban areas, and negative attitude towards their mother tongue (Reddy, 2009, 2010; Lakra & Rahman, 2017). Recent efforts to document indigenous Dravidian languages include the Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages (www.sppel.org/) established in 2013 and the University Grants Commission’s Centre for Endangered Languages (https://cfelvb.in/) Organisations like SIL International, Ethnologue and UNESCO have listed works on Dravidian languages about language endangerment.
Dravidian languages in other territories Bangladesh The 15th amendment of the Constitution of Bangladesh in 2011 states that the people of Bangladesh would be called Bangladeshi by citizenship and Bangalee/Bengali by nationality. The socalled indigenous languages, including Kurux, are found only in the informal family domains, which lead to the endangerment of the language (Sultana, 2021). However, in recent years, efforts are underway to improve the status of the indigenous languages of Bangladesh, which may enhance their survival (Rahman et al., 2019). Kurux (Kurukh/Urang), the mother tongue of the ethnic community called Oraons/Uranw, believed to have migrated from Chota Nagpur of India, is spoken in the Barind and Sylhet regions 176
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of Bangladesh. The population as per the 2011 census is 50,000 (Ethnologue). They are mainly multilingual. Adults are proficient in Kurux and Sadri, an Indo-Aryan language (Rahman et al., 2019, p. 70). SIL prepared a report using a wordlist by gathering words from the Kurux variety of Bangladesh and compared with Kurux speakers of different villages to ascertain similarities within the Kurux varieties. It is reported that in an analysis based on a wordlist consisting of 307 words, a similarity of 84.93% was found among the villages. However, in another wordlist consisting of 210 based on the Kurux variety spoken in a village of West Bengal, India, the similarity was 39–41%. Another wordlist in Bangla achieved 20–23% similarity. These comparisons indicate that Kurux of Bangladesh borrows heavily from Bangla, an Indo-Aryan language leading to lexical convergence. It is also reported that while adults use Kurux widely in villages, but many children reportedly speak Bangla as their first language (Ahmad et al., 2011, p. 11). The language is endangered as it is one of the languages classified as vulnerable by UNESCO.
Nepal The Kurux language, also known as Jhangar/Dhangar, is spoken by the Uranw (Oraon) community living in the Terai area of Southwestern Nepal. Uranw and Sapkota (2013) provide a description of the Kurux language in terms of bilingualism, attitude, maintenance etc. Turin and Yadav (2007) report that among the 59 indigenous languages, Jhangar is one of them, with 41,764 persons speaking the language as per the Central Bureau of Statistics of Nepal, 2001. As reported in the National Population and Housing Census, 2011, Kurux is spoken by 33,651 people in Nepal. Ethnologue reports that this is a decreasing trend. With regard to the names Jhangar or Dhangar, Shackelford (2022, p. 1) convincingly argues that ‘Kurux is the insider name for the language’. Similar to Bangladesh, there is no concrete evidence to specify the exact migration period. However, scholars agree that the migration of Oraons to Nepal from India was likely to have happened 200 years ago. Due to the long-time contact with Indo-European, Munda and Tibeto-Burman, the Kurux language shows several structural changes (Gordon, 1973, p. 37, cited in Shackelford, 2022, p. 4). Turin and Yadav (2007) classified languages based on the degree of endangerment and the indigenous languages of Nepal into seven types, from safe to extinct or nearly extinct. Dhangar/ Jhangar is in the second type as ‘almost safe languages’. Shackelford (2022) made a comprehensive study of the Kurux Language of Nepal, concluding that Kurux speakers in India and Nepal have a unified identity. He reports that language attitudes among Kurux speakers were generally positive and that the degree of language vitality within the community was strong, despite some signs of erosion.
Pakistan and Afghanistan Brahui, a North Dravidian language geographically distant even from its counterparts in its subgroup, is spoken by 2,640,000 people, as per the 2017 census in the Kalat and Quetta regions of Balochistan and Sindh provinces of Pakistan. Brahui is variously known as Brahugi, Brahuigi or Kur Galli and Sarwan/Saravani, Jharawan/Jhalavani, Chagi, Raxshanic and Kalat dialects (Ethnologue, Sani et al., 2014, Dinakhel, 2018: Brohi, 2018, p. 155). Emeneau (1962, pp. 430–442) stated that bilingualism is always unidirectional. He analysed three successive censuses of Pakistan from 1911 to 1931 and observed that ‘the Brahuis who are bilingual in Balochi to a much greater extent than the Baloches are bilingual in Brahui’ (p. 436). He cites Bray (1934) who discusses the low prestige held by Brahui speakers, in addition to the direction of borrowings from Balochi to Brahui. 177
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Most Brahui speakers are bilingual in Brahui and Balochi, the latter being a genetically unrelated Iranian language. However, despite the borrowings mentioned by Bray (1934) as cited earlier, the two languages are not mixed consciously by such speakers, for whom the choice of language is an important social and psychological decision. Since Urdu is the official language of Pakistan, the Brahui speakers know some Urdu (Elfenbein, 1989). Bashir (2016, pp. 271–277) conducted a survey of studies on contact and convergence of Brahui with other languages. Birahmani and Lohar (2019) conducted a study on language maintenance among Brahui speakers of Sindh Province, collecting data from 24 male informants. They found that the Brohi (Brahui) people of Dadu city had shifted from Brahui to Sindhi. These post – shift speakers strongly expressed positive attitudes towards Sindhi and ‘believed the Brahui language as a worthless and difficult language’ (Birahmani & Lohar, 2019, p. 334). UNESCO reported the Brahui language as ‘vulnerable’. Bashir (2018, p. 20) observes that an attempt in 1990 to introduce Brahui as a medium of instruction (Sabir, 2008) in government schools in Balochistan was short-lived, partly because parents themselves expressed a preference for Urdu as a medium of instruction, fearing that instruction in a local language would have a ‘ghettoizing’ effect. However, Bashir notes further that starting in 2008, another attempt was made by theBrahui Language Board in the Department of Brahui, at the University of Balochistan to revisit projects such as re-designing the Brahui script/orthography; standardising the majority dialect etc. The estimated number of speakers of Brahui in Afghanistan is 200,000, where it is reported that the number of speakers is increasing (Ethnologue). Kieffer (1982) reports that the speakers of Brahui are found along the banks of Helmand and claim to belong to the Baloch ethnic group. Citing from another source (Rzehak, 2009), Bahry (2013, p. 61) states that ‘Brahui speakers are frequently bilingual in Balochi, a local LWC [Language of Wider Communication], while Balochi speakers generally do not learn Brahui’.
Sri Lanka The 5 million Tamil population in Sri Lanka comprises two groups: (a) the Sri Lankan Tamils who are chiefly spread in the Northern and Eastern Provinces and are considered to have migrated to Sri Lanka in the 2nd or 3rd century BC, and (b) the so-called Indian Tamils, who were drawn from India during the 19th century by the Britishers for plantation work. Speakers of other Dravidian languages like Malayalam (713,000) and Telugu (230,000) can be found in different parts of the country. Bonta (2020, pp. 1–30) studied the Telugu-speaking Gypsy communities in Sri Lanka. Several regional and social dialects viz., Jaffna Tamil, Batticaloa Tamil, Pa:tiri Tamil, Muslim Tamil etc. are identified. The Jaffna Tamil dialect has specific linguistic features which reflect the social hierarchy, in terms of education, age and caste. This variety has specific usages indicative of the high, middle and low castes (Suseendirarajah, 1970). Studies on language use show deviations in the traditional caste classifications and demonstrate how war, militancy and migration have directly influenced caste (Kuganathan, 2014). Tamil and Sinhalese have been in contact for more than 2000 years, and even though Sinhalese is the majority language (spoken by 75% of the population) and politically dominant, Thampoe (2016, pp. 241–252) observed that ‘the variety of Tamil spoken in Sri Lanka, by and large, has the same features as Tamil generally and shares to a large extent these features with other major 178
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Dravidian languages’. According to Coperahewa (2007, p. 141), Tamil had ‘prestige’ status in Sri Lanka after the 13th century due to political reasons. He also reports (2007, p. 144) that there are numerous borrowings mainly from Sinhala, with around 900 words, including some basic vocabulary. Schiffman (2016, p. 655) offers the opinion that the language policy of Sri Lanka has been the most problematic of all the languages in this region (South Asia). According to him, ‘the denial of the linguistic right to a large linguistic minority’ led to the failure of the ‘Sinhala Only Act’ of 1956. The 1978 constitutional modification did not improve things sufficiently, since although it gave ‘national language status’ to Tamil, it remained ‘ fundamentally subordinate to Sinhala’ (de Silva Wijeyeratne, 2013). This constitutional modification could not stop the civil war which began in 1983. Consequently, through the 13th Amendment to the Constitution adopted in 1987, Tamil was raised to official language status along with Sinhala), while English became the link language. Wyss (2020) gives a detailed historical account of the issues related language policy of Sri Lanka after its independence concluding by citing various reports that ‘it was too little too late’. The post-civil war language policy as recommended by the Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) in 2011 is implemented to make all Sri Lankan citizens to be proficient in Sinhalese, Tamil and English (Herath, 2015). Only time will tell whether Sri Lanka can implement a language policy effectively acceptable to all the stockholders. Canagarajah (1995, 2005) analysed the speech patterns of Jaffna Tamils in relation to English prior to the end of the war. He found that people of Jaffna consciously used pure Tamil while English mixed Tamil is also prevalent. The present situation of language use among the Tamils in Jaffna in the post-war scenario is worthy of further study.
Conclusion Studies on the sociolinguistics of Dravidian languages in South Asia are more numerous in some regions than others. Code-switching, code-mixing of settled minorities, attitudes among language minorities, domains of language use and the influence of English are some of the crucial areas that deserve elaborate treatment in future research. As the relationship between Dravidian languages and the respective societies is multidimensional, such research is bound to be amply rewarding.
Notes 1 A small diasporic population consisting of Telugu (230,000) and Malayalam (730,000) is present in Sri Lanka. In Pakistan, a micro level minority of Tamils (estimated as 2000 by Ethnologue) is present. These linguistic situations are yet to be explored adequately. 2 It is an Indo-Aryan language.
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14 SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF SOUTH ASIA Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic and other languages David Bradley and Panchanan Mohanty
Overview Northern South Asia is the main home of Indo-European Indic languages, and southern South Asia is the main home of Dravidian languages, as discussed in other chapters, but there are various other language families represented: (1) Tibeto-Burman (TB) in the north and northeast, (2) Austroasiatic (AA: Munda, Khasi, Nicobarese) in the east, (3) Tai in the far northeast and (4) Andamanese languages; also isolates Burushaski in Pakistan-controlled northern Kashmir, Kusunda in western Nepal and Nihali in central India. In terms of speaker populations, most of these languages are small; but altogether there are more languages than there are Indic and Dravidian languages. In general, all of the languages spoken in South Asia show a strong Indic and some Dravidian lexical and structural influence. This is presumably an outcome of long-term contact, as discussed at length in Masica (1976), Shapiro and Schiffman (1981) and Mohanty (2008). A major factor in the sociolinguistic status of languages in South Asia is official recognition. In India, Schedule VIII of the constitution now lists 22 official languages including TB Bodo of Assam and Meitei of Manipur, both in the northeast, and AA Santal in the east; the rest are all Indic or Dravidian languages. In some states, various additional languages have state official status; this includes TB Bhutia (Denjong Tibetan), Lepcha and Limbu in Sikkim and TB Mizo in Mizoram, among others. Adding languages to Schedule VIII status or state-level official status has long been difficult and controversial, with major political movements leading to most of the additions to Schedule VIII in 1992 and 2003, including the Bodoland movement from the early 1980s for Bodo. The only TB language of South Asia with national official status is Dzongkha in Bhutan; this is a variety of Southern Tibetan very similar to Denjong Bhutia of Sikkim; Bhutia or Bhotia is an Indic term for all kinds of Tibetans. Modern literary Tibetan is the official language of the Tibetan government in exile, based at Dharamsala in northwest India; Tibetan is also the liturgical language of followers of Tibetan Buddhism including refugees from Tibet in Nepal and all over India, also various indigenous groups in northwest India, northern Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan, many of whom also speak local varieties of Tibetan, such as Sherpa in northeast Nepal. In Nepal since the 2015 constitution, all of the more than a hundred indigenous languages of the country are recognised, including many TB languages and some AA Munda languages., However, Indic Nepali remains the national language. Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka all have an Indic language as DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-17 184
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the main national language: Bangla, Urdu and Sinhalese respectively; Dravidian Tamil also has official status in Sri Lanka. Some TB languages were formerly the official languages of smaller political entities: Newar in the Kathmandu kingdom prior to its conquest by the Nepali-speaking Gurkhas in 1768 and Tripuri in Tripura State in the northeast of India. In both cases, the local TB language is gradually losing ground to the incoming Indic language: Bangla in Tripura and Nepali in the Kathmandu valley. Few monolingual speakers remain, and public life is dominated by the Indic language. Many of these languages are written with various Indic scripts, particularly Devanagari, also Bangla/Assamese in Bangladesh and northeast India. Others have romanisations implemented as part of Christian missionary efforts during the British colonial period. Various TB languages have their own distinctive old Indic scripts, including TB Meitei and Lepcha in India, TB Newar and Limbu in Nepal, Tibetan and so on. In a few cases such as Bodo, there are competing Devanagari and romanised scripts. For Bodo, the Devanagari script has official status and is widely used, but some Christians continue to use the romanisation. For some languages with older Indic scripts, these are now mainly replaced: Newar now uses Devanagari and Meitei has long used Bangla script, but is in the process of returning to the use of traditional Meitei Mayek script by 2023. In all cases, education policy follows language policy. In India, government policy requires every student to study three languages; these are normally selected from the Schedule VIII languages plus English. This means that few speakers of TB, AA or other languages have any education in the mother tongue. In Bhutan, basic education is in TB Dzongkha, with English as a second language. In the west of Bhutan, most people have Dzongkha as their mother tongue, but for the rest of the country who speak a variety of TB languages or Nepali, it is a second language. The main source of mother-tongue education for many small groups in South Asia is Christian religious education, often using materials in romanisations. In some particularly multilingual states of India where many TB languages are spoken, like Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast, English is the official state language but various TB languages are taught in government schools. In two states, English is co-official with the main local TB language: Meitei in Manipur and Mizo in Mizoram. In Meghalaya, English is the official state language, but TB Mandi/Garo and AA Khasi are also used in some education. English medium education is widespread in the northeast and elsewhere, especially in private schools, and the second and third languages usually are Hindi and some other Schedule VIII language, typically Sanskrit for Hindus. There is one unusual type of contact between TB and Indic languages across much of the middle hills in northwest South Asia: some families of speakers of a Pahari Hindi variety from particular castes with certain traditionally low-status occupations (leatherworkers, tailors, musicians and so on) live in villages where most of the local population speak a TB language (Saxena, 2022). This can be stable for a long time, as in Lahul and Kinnaur in northeast Himachal Pradesh and nearby in northwest Uttarakhand, or it can lead to gradual language shift to the Indic language, as in much of Uttarakhand and parts of Nepal, where there are also higher-caste Nepali speakers in the villages of many TB groups. Sometimes the TB language has ceased to be spoken within living memory, as in the case of Rangka in northeast Uttarakhand, and sometimes the shift is ongoing, as in the case of Raji, Darma, Chaudangsi and Byangsi on both sides of the western border of Nepal. Occasionally a single village may continue speaking a TB language in an area where everyone else now speaks only an Indic language, as in the case of Malana village near Kulu where TB Kanashi is spoken (Saxena & Borin, 2022); this language is not spoken elsewhere. One effect of contact during the colonial period is the spread of Nepali as a result of recruitment to the British and later Indian, Singapore and Brunei Gurkha regiments, and later the recruitment of tea plantation workers from Nepal for northeast India. Since 1815, recruitment to the Gurkha 185
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forces was mainly from groups with TB languages, such as Gurung, Tamang, Rai (which includes groups speaking a wide variety of Kiranti languages) and Limbu. The lingua franca of these regiments has always been Nepali; the British and other officers who command them also speak some Nepali. After many years of service, returning Gurkha soldiers brought Nepali back to their villages across Nepal. Gurkha settlements near military bases in India and elsewhere also became a focus for use of Nepali instead of traditional TB languages. From 1837, large numbers of families were brought from across Nepal to work in tea plantations in Assam and later Darjeeling District; in most of these areas, Nepali is spoken and the only vestige of TB identity is in surnames. Various colonial contact languages have developed in South Asia, not only English. Portuguese colonial presence from 1510 in Goa and elsewhere along the coast led to the development of Portuguese contact varieties, particularly in Goa but also elsewhere, such as at Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka and spreading beyond South Asia to Melaka and Macao (Cardoso, 2014). Also, around Batticaloa, a contact variety of Malay developed during the Dutch colonial period due to population movement from the Dutch East Indies (Ansaldo & Lim, 2014). These varieties became quite distinct from their lexical source languages; most are now endangered, some severely, or no longer spoken. In some other former Portuguese or Dutch settlements, distinct groups remain and have a separate identity, such as the Burgher (Dutch-descent) group in Sri Lanka, even though the excolonial language is long gone and they now consider South Asian English their ‘ethnic’ language. Portuguese surnames are extremely common among the mixed-descent Anglo-Indian community, reflecting this ancestry. In Nepal since 2007, the Linguistic Survey of Nepal, based at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, surveys and documents the languages of Nepal, particularly those which are endangered. In India, the Central Institute of Indian Languages, now based in Mysore, has worked to document smaller languages of India. In northeast India and elsewhere, there is extensive work being done to document endangered languages and to assist communities to revitalise their languages. The Indian government supports three Centres for Endangered Languages: at Sikkim University, at Tezpur University in Assam, and at Rajiv Gandhi University in Arunachal Pradesh (Modi, 2022); there are also many individual community members and scholars, and some foreign assistance. A similar centre was established in Bangladesh in 2022. These efforts are mainly focussed on endangered TB languages. Sikkim State, which is between eastern Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet and Darjeeling district of West Bengal, is an interesting example of political, demographic and sociolinguistic changes over recent centuries. It was originally a kingdom with Tibetan kings who spoke the Denjong variety of Tibetan and also ruled the TB Lepcha area in southeast Sikkim and a few villages of TB Limbu in the southwest. Under British rule, it was one of many small semi-autonomous princely states in treaty relations with the British. The British took Darjeeling District from Sikkim in 1835; later immigration produced Nepali-speaking majorities in Darjeeling and south Sikkim. In 1975, Sikkim became a state of India; the 1977 Sikkim Official Languages Act recognised Nepali and Bhutia (Denjong Tibetan), with an amendment in 1981 adding Lepcha and Limbu. These three TB languages are supported by the Sikkim Ministry of Education with teaching materials and original literature, and are now taught up to the MA level at Sikkim University. The Centre for Endangered Languages at Sikkim University also does research on several endangered TB languages among the migrants from Nepal. Across South Asia, many of the TB, AA and other non-Indic and non-Dravidian languages have been or are being replaced by a nearby Indic language. For example, TB Lepcha is endangered in its traditional area; all ethnic Lepcha now speak Nepali, and many do not speak Lepcha; this is despite official recognition and use in education and community cultural activism. 186
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Language and ethnic names show a great deal of variety depending on which language is being used; often there are names used by outsiders in dominant Indic or other languages, and a separate autonym. Sometimes a language includes several distinct named and recognised ethnic groups, like Raji, Raute and Rawat or Zakhring and Meyor; sometimes there are general terms used by outsiders to refer to a number of groups with distinct languages, like the Nepali term Rai for the numerous Kiranti languages. There is an established list of Scheduled Tribes in India, which includes all types of names. It is possible for a Scheduled Tribe to change its name, as the Lisu recently did: they used to be called Yobin, a name ultimately derived from a pejorative Chinese term yeren ‘wild people’ via the former Burmese term Yawyin.
Tibeto-Burman languages TB includes three main subfamilies, Western, Central and Eastern, with a few languages unclassified (Bradley, 1997). Most of the TB languages of northeast South Asia are Central TB; most of the TB languages of northwest India, Nepal and Bhutan are Western TB; two languages which are mainly spoken in Burma but extend into eastern Bangladesh and northeast India are Eastern TB; one further cluster and two additional languages remain unclassified, but clearly TB. References in this section are to recent studies which include extensive sociolinguistic information. Western TB includes two main groups: Bodic (Bod is the Tibetan word for Tibet) and Himalayic. The main literary Bodic language is Tibetan; this has been written since the mid-seventh century. Within Bodic, the Tibetan subgroup languages in South Asia include theWestern cluster in north Pakistani Kashmir, Ladakh, north Himachal Pradesh and northwest Nepal; the Central cluster in northeast Nepal; and the Southern cluster in Sikkim and western Bhutan. Two other subgroups of Bodic are West Bodish in Nepal and East Bodish in northeast Bhutan and nearby. The Western cluster of Tibetan includes Balti/Purik spoken by Ismaili Muslims in Baltistan in Pakistani Kashmir and Purik in northeast Indian Kashmir, with many Perso-Arabic and Urdu loanwords (Sprigg, 2002). Nearly all other speakers of Bodic languages follow Tibetan Buddhism; within the Western cluster, this includes those of Ladakh (Abdul Hamid, 1998) and Zangskar in what was formerly northeast Kashmir but is now the new Union Territory of Ladakh; also those of north Himachal Pradesh and the Tibetans of Mustang in far north Nepal, as well as others in west Tibet. There are several Central cluster languages in northeast Nepal, including Yolmo (Gawne, 2016), Lhomi and Sherpa; the Central cluster also includes the Lhasa dialect, widely used as a spoken lingua franca, and other varieties in Tibet. The Southern cluster is mainly Sikkim Denjong and Bhutan Dzongkha (van Driem & Tsering, 1998), with a related variety nearby in Tibet. West Bodish is a more distinct subgroup in north central Nepal, from Chantyal (Noonan, 1999) in the west to Tamang in the east. The Thakali (Georg, 1996) are highly mobile traditional traders; the Chantyal developed around former mines; the Gurung and Tamang were heavily recruited as Gurkha soldiers. They are partly Tibetan Buddhist and partly Hindu; all speakers also speak Nepali. The East Bodish or Bumthang subgroup languages are spoken in northeast Bhutan, with one language extending into Tawang District of northwest Arunachal Pradesh in India and into Tibet; the best-documented language is Kurtöp (Hyslop, 2017). There are three main subgroups of TB Himalayic languages: Western, Central and Eastern or Kiranti. Western Himalayic includes Lahul, Kinnaur, Central and Eastern clusters. Most Western Himalayic languages are spoken by pastoralist groups with high-altitude summer grazing villages and lower winter villages; the latter also have low-caste Pahari Hindi speakers. The Raji/ Raute/Rawat are former hunter-gatherers now settled in permanent villages (Fortier, 2019). The main language of the Lahul cluster is known as Pattani in Hindi and as Manchad in Tibetan. 187
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The Kinnauri cluster (Saxena, 2022) also includes Kanashi (Saxena & Borin, 2022). The bestdocumented Central cluster language is Bunan (Widmer, 2014). Extinct Zhangzhung was the language of a kingdom in western Tibet conquered by the Tibetans in 645; some lexicon survives in the Tibetan Bon religion. Darma (Willis-Oko, 2019) Byangsi (Sharma, 2007) and Chaudangsi are Eastern subgroup languages, as was Rangka. Central West Himalayic includes languages of the middle hills of north central Nepal: from west to east, Magar, Kham (Watters, 2002), Kaike (Regmi, 2013), Chepang (Caughley, 2000), Newar (Genetti, 2007) and Thangmi (Turin, 2012) among others. Newar is the language of the Kathmandu valley, with extensive literature since 1112, also spoken along the trade route to Tibet in Dolakha. Newar is also known as Nepala Bhasa ‘language of the Nepal (i.e. Kathmandu) valley’. All speakers also speak Nepali; many do not speak their traditional languages, and some languages, like Baram, are critically endangered. Eastern West Himalayic is better-known as Kiranti from the name of an old kingdom of eastern Nepal, or as Rai in Nepali. This includes a very large number of languages and groups, from Hayu (Michailovsky, 1989) in the west to Limbu (van Driem, 1987) in the east; Limbu also extends east into India. Ethnically, Limbu is not classified as part of Kiranti or Rai. Limbu has an old traditional script. Men from different language affiliations have served as Gurkha soldiers since 1815, and as a consequence many of these languages are endangered, some critically, or no longer spoken, replaced by Nepali. Central TB includes three main groups: Northern, Sal or Central and South. Languages of four subgroups of Northern are spoken across north Arunachal Pradesh. The westernmost is Hrusish or Miji, which includes Hruso, Dhammai and Levai, also known to outsiders as Aka, Miij and Bangrü; Koro is a recently documented language which also fits here. The nearby Bugun or Kho-Bwa group comprises Bugun, Duhumbi, Khispi, Men, Boot and Puroik, known to outsiders as Khowa, Chug, Lish, Sherdukpen, Sartang and Sulung (Jacquesson, 2015). Lexical differences within these subgroups are substantial, with Koro and Puroik particularly distinctive; conversely, Men/Sherdukpen and Boot/Sartang are mutually intelligible though they regard themselves as distinct ethnic groups. The Tani group has two clusters, Western and Eastern. Western Tani is mainly in Subansiri District and includes Apa Tani in the Ziro valley, Nishi (formerly known pejoratively as Dafla), Miri, Galo and others. Eastern Tani is mainly in Siang District and includes many languages and varieties collectively known as Adi (formerly pejoratively Abor); easternmost Milang (Modi, 2017) is more distinctive. One language, Mising, extends into the plains of northeast Assam. Mishmi is an Indic collective name for four distinct ethnic groups and languages of northeast Arunachal Pradesh in different groups of Central TB. Digarish Mishmi is the easternmost sub-group of the North Central cluster and Mijuish Mishmi is the northernmost sub-group of the South Central cluster. Digarish Mishmi includes Taruang, formerly known as Digaro Mishmi, and Kera’a, also known to outsiders as Idu and formerly known as Chulikata Mishmi. Some speakers of these languages also live in Tibet. There are three subgroups within the Central or Sal group: Bodo-Garo-Northern Naga, Jinghpaw/Sak and Mru. The term Sal is an etymon for ‘sun’, one of many lexical innovations, some shared with the South Central cluster. The Bodo-Garo languages are spoken mainly in Assam; some smaller languages in the west, like Rabha (Joseph, 2007), are endangered. Bodo in central Assam is receding, but there is political activism for the language. Mandi in west Meghalaya and northeast Bangladesh, known in Indic languages and English as Garo (Burling, 2004), is more vigorous. A romanisation of the Achik dialect is the standard. Dimasa and Tiwa of southeast Assam and Tripuri of Tripura and nearby are fairly vital, but Deori in northeast Assam is endangered. These languages are written with the Bangla/Assamese script. In southeast Arunachal Pradesh and 188
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in Burma are the Northern Naga cluster languages, Khiamnyungan, Phom, Chang, Konyak, Wancho, Nocte and a composite of various languages known as Tangsa in India and as Tangshang in Burma (Morey, 2017). The term Tangsa was coined in 1948 and means ‘mountain son’; Tangshang was coined in Burma 2003. These languages are written with romanisations; some also have newly invented indigenous orthographies. In the Jinghpaw/Sak subgroup, Morey (2010) describes the Turung variety of Jinghpaw spoken in far northeast India; another nearby variety is Singpho. Most Jinghpaw are in Burma and some in China; there they use a nineteenth-century Christian romanisation for a simplified compromise variety not intelligible to the Turung. Another label for Jinghpaw is the Burmese name Kachin, though this also includes several other languages of Burma and China. Lucien Bernot (1967) describes the Sak language of Bangladesh; this and other Sak languages, all endangered, are spoken in Burma. Former Sak groups in central Manipur now speak only Meitei, though some are attempting to revive their former Sak languages, named according to villages: Sengmai or Sekmai, Chairel and Andro. Lui is a pejorative former Meitei and Indic name for these groups. The third subgroup is Mru, spoken in southeast Bangladesh and Burma. Most unusually for TB, Mru is verbmedial; all other TB languages of South Asia are verb-final. The South Central group includes the complex ‘Kuki-Chin’ subgroup of southeast Bangladesh, all of Mizoram and parts of Manipur, Tripura and southeast Assam states in India and extends into Burma. Kuki is a former Indic collective name for many small groups; Chin is a Burmese collective name. The largest language is Mizo, formerly known as Lushai, a co-official language of Mizoram State in northeast India written in a romanisation (Chhangte, 1993). Two further languages have undergone substantial Indianisation but are probably also part of this subgroup: Meitei in Manipur (Chelliah, 1997) and Karbi or Arleng, formerly known as Mikir, in east Assam south of the Brahmaputra River (Konnerth, 2020). Naga ‘snake’ is a general Indic cover term for the South Central group languages of the Zeme, Tangkhul, Angami and Ao subgroups and for the Northern Naga subgroup of the Sal group. Naga subsumes all the indigenous groups of Nagaland State as well as many in north Manipur, southeast Arunachal Pradesh and nearby in Assam. This term was added after a more specific name, also sometimes an Indic name. Now it is often omitted; thus Ao Naga is now Ao. The Zeme subgroup is scattered in northwest Manipur, southwest Nagaland and southeast Assam; a former collective term Kaccha Naga ‘bad Naga’ is for obvious reasons no longer used. There have been some recent mergers of several of these ethnic groups; for example Zeliangrong includes Zeme (formerly Empeo), Mzieme, Liangmei (formerly Kwoireng) and Nruanghmei. The Tangkhul subgroup is in northeast Manipur, southwest Nagaland and nearby in Burma. Tangkhul is a local lingua franca and a cover term for speakers of various related TB languages in this area, some of which are recognised as separate ethnic groups in Burma; additional languages continue to be located. The Meitei term for Tangkhul is Luhupa. In the Angami subgroup of central Nagaland, the composite groups Angami and Rengma included speakers of several distinct languages. For example, Angami included Angami itself, also Chokri, Kezha and Mao, though Kezha and Mao are now recognised as separate ethnic groups. Other recent ethnic changes include a merger of some former Angami and some former Sangtam to create the Chakhesang group. There have also been name changes: the former Sema is now Sumi or sometimes Simi. The Ao subgroup of north Nagaland includes Ao (Coupe, 2007), Sangtam, Lhota and Yimchungrü. Each has substantial internal dialect differences, and in each case, a romanisation of one dialect is used. A transitional variety of Ao spoken in two villages reflects contact with Phom and Chang, adjacent Sal group Northern Naga languages. 189
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The northernmost subgroup of South Central is Mijuish Mishmi, which includes the Keman, known to outsiders as Miju, and a group with no name, comprising two clans Zakhring and Meyor, known in Tibet by the Tibetan name Zha. Geographically, this is separated from the rest of South Central by the Northern Naga languages. Two Eastern TB languages in South Asia have spread relatively recently from Burma. Southeast Bangladesh was part of Arakan (own name Rakhine) until the Burmans conquered it in 1784; thus there are various groups speaking Bangla-related languages in Arakan State in Burma including Rohingya, and various varieties of the Arakanese dialect of Burmese spoken in southeast Bangladesh. The Arakanese court fled in 1784 and became the Marma ethnic group in inland southeast Bangladesh (Denise Bernot, 1958); their dialect is very distinct from that of all other Arakanese. The latter also extend into Tripura State of India, where they are known as Mogh. They are Theravada Buddhist and use the Burmese script and Indic Pali as a liturgical language. The Lisu came into northeast Arunachal Pradesh from Putao District in north Burma in 1942; the one Lisu village, Gandhinagar, is in contact with Lisu elsewhere and uses the Lisu script developed from 1914 by Protestant missionaries in China and Burma (Bradley, 2021). There is one further unclassified cluster of TB languages: Dhimalish, which includes Dhimal (King, 2009) in southeast Nepal, Toto in Darjeeling District of India and Lhokpu in southwest Bhutan; all are bilingual in the local dominant language. Two further TB languages whose position within TB is not yet determined are Lepcha and Tsangla. Lepcha is the traditional but endangered language of southeast Sikkim, Kalimpong in Darjeeling District and far southwest Bhutan. Its orthography is several hundred years old (Tamsang, 1980; Plaisier, 2007); there is extensive Tibetan lexical influence. Tshangla (Andvik, 2010) is spoken in southeast Bhutan and nearby in India and Tibet; it is also a lingua franca in this area among various smaller TB groups. In Tibet, Tshangla is known as Motuo Menba (the Monpa of Motuo County), and in India as Central and Eastern Monpa; in Dzongkha it is Sharchopkha ‘eastern speech’. In Tibetan, the term Monpa refers generally to Buddhist non-Tibetans of this area; in India, Northern Monpa refers to the East Bodish language spoken in Tawang District. In China, the Menba national minority also includes the Pangchen Menba of Cuona County, who speak the same East Bodish language, as do the Dzala and Dakpa of northeast Bhutan.
Austroasiatic languages The AA family of languages is widespread in Southeast Asia, with many branches not found in South Asia. The AA languages of South Asia are in three branches: Munda, Khasi and Nicobarese. Munda languages are spoken in eastern India, with a few extending into west Bangladesh and southeast Nepal; Khasi languages are spoken in northeast India, extending into northeast Bangladesh; and Nicobarese languages are spoken in the Nicobar Islands. Munda is the largest branch, with more than 15 languages. Thirteen of these have been discussed in Anderson (2008). There are various additional groups whose speech has not been studied or documented: Kol, Juray, Māṭiā, Bhumij, Turi, Mahali, Asuri, Binjhia, etc. Some further Munda languages have become extinct as communities have switched to Indic or sometimes Dravidian languages. Though Munda languages are now confined to the eastern states of India and nearby in Nepal and Bangladesh, there is ample evidence that they formerly extended to Maharashtra in the west of India (Mohanty et al., 2013). The Munda languages have been subgrouped in different ways by Pinnow (1963), Bhattacharya (1975) and Anderson (2001). Anderson (2008) classifies them in two branches, North Munda comprising Korku and the Kherwarian languages including Santali, Mundari and Ho; and South 190
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Munda encompassing Saura (Sora, Savara), Gorum, Gtaʔ, Remo, Gutob, Juang and Kharia. Problems persist regarding identification and classification of these languages. Nagaraja and Mankodi (2010, p. 10) say “Still there are problems of such names and groupings”, such as Birhor and Asuri which may be dialects of Santali, and Ho which may be a dialect of Mundari. Anderson reiterates what Zide and Zide (1976) first noted, It is surprising that nothing in the way of quotations from a Munda language turned up in (the hundreds and hundreds of) Sanskrit or middle Indic texts. There is also a surprising lack of borrowing of names of plant/animal/bird, etc. into Sanskrit. (Anderson, 2008, p. 4) Presumably the hill and forest-dwelling Munda groups did not participate in the four-way caste system prevalent in ancient India: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra. They presumably had no or minimal contact and interaction with the caste Hindus. Therefore, the absence of Munda words in Sanskrit and middle Indic texts is expected and natural. As stated earlier, Santali is the only Munda language that has been recognised as a Schedule VIII language in the Constitution of India. It is, in fact, the most important and numerically the largest among the AA languages in South Asia. All speaker numbers here are from the 2011 censuses of India and Nepal and the 2021 Census of Bangladesh. Santali has about 7.65 million speakers in total, with a large number of speakers in the eastern Indian states of Jharkhand (2,754,723), West Bengal (2,512,331), Odisha (894,764) and Bihar (406,076) and extending into Nepal (49,900) and Bangladesh (225,000). It was formerly written in the scripts of the states in which it was spoken: Devanagari in the presentday Jharkhand and Bihar, Bangla in West Bengal, and Odia in Odisha. Ragunath Murmu, a Santali intellectual from Odisha, invented a script named Ol Chiki for this language in 1925, which has been recognised as its official script and is now used for writing this language. Korku had 208,165 speakers in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Mundari has 736,524 speakers in Bihar, 7,800 in Nepal and 2,500 in Bangladesh. Ho has 648,060 speakers in Odisha. All but one of the South Munda languages are spoken in Odisha; Kharia had 171,269 speakers in Bihar, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh and 240 in Nepal. Among the South Munda languages, Saura (Sora, Savara) is the most numerous with 534,751 speakers in India and 7,000 in Bangladesh. Though its centre is Odisha, it has a sizeable number of speakers in north Andhra Pradesh and Assam. It has a script named Sora Sompeng, but this is not in use and the language is usually written in Odia script in Odisha and in Telugu script in Andhra Pradesh. Juang is a language spoken by 47,095 speakers in the Keonjhar and Dhenkanal districts of Odisha. All the other languages are confined to the border districts of south Odisha. Lord Jagannath, the most prominent and tutelary deity of Odisha, is claimed to originally be from the Saura tribe. For this reason, several Munda words are used in the Jagannath temple register of Indic Odia. A prominent example is /aṇasara/ which has been linked to Sanskrit /anavasara/ meaning ‘without leisure’ by some scholars. But semantically, it is just the opposite. After the ritual bath on the full-moon day of the Hindu month Jyēṣṭha (mid-May to mid-June), Lord Jagannath suffers from fever for two weeks. During this time, no Brahmin is allowed to perform the usual daily rituals and He is looked after by His non-Brahmin kinsman. This 14-day period is called /aɳasara/ /aṇasara/. Actually, this is a Munda word meaning ‘to wipe, to dry’. After the bath, it is natural to wipe and dry Lord Jagannath’s body. The Gadaba tribe in south Orissa and northern Andhra Pradesh have two languages: Munda Gutob and Dravidian Ollari. The first is spoken in Vijayanagaram District of Andhra Pradesh; the second is spoken in Koraput District of Odisha. These two groups are locally called /baṛa gadabā/ 191
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‘big (senior) Gadaba’ who speak Gutob, and /sāna gadabā/ ‘small (junior) Gadaba’, who speak Dravidian Ollari. Presumably the entire Gadaba group was originally Munda-speaking, but with contact, a large part of them shifted to Dravidian Ollari. Bhattacharya (1957, p. 2) derives the name Ollari from the Gutob word /ola/ ‘leaf’ because the women used leaves for clothing, but this derivation looks far-fetched. Rather, the name can be linked to Tamil /ollar/ ‘enemy’ (Burrow & Emeneau, 1984, p. 96). Perhaps because they shifted to speaking a Dravidian language, they were treated as enemies by the Munda-speaking group. The Ollari are also called Kondekor ‘hill-dwelling’, as they formerly lived in the hills (Bapuji, 2019). In the Census of India report, Munda Gutob and Dravidian Ollari are listed together as Gadaba, with 84,689 speakers; the Gutob-speaking Gadaba were about 5,000 in 1998 (Griffiths, 2008, p. 635). Since many tribal communities are shifting to Desia, the local variety of Odia, the number of Gutob speakers is probably now much less. Gutob is unwritten. Gorum is generally known by the exonyms Parengi and Parenga; it has striking similarities with Gutob. Though the 2011 Census of India report puts their population at 9,445, during our fieldwork there were hardly 25 to 30 fluent speakers. Most people in their 40s and above understood the language but could not speak it. Those who were in their 30s or less had shifted to Desia, the local variety of Odia. This is one of the least studied Munda languages and is also unwritten. Remo is another South Munda language spoken in the hills of south Odisha. They are generally known by the exonym Bonda or Bondo. They call themselves /rema/ ‘man’ and their language is /rema-sām/. This language is better conserved because they lived in the Jeypore Hills of Koraput District, where they were known for their ferocious nature. Now, many of them live in the plains and they have divided into two groups, Hill Bonda and Plains Bonda. Remo is unwritten. The 8,890 speaker-strong Gtaʔ are also known as Didayi; they live in the districts of Malkangiri and Koraput in Odisha. This group also has two divisions, Hill Gtaʔ and Plains Gtaʔ, and it is unwritten. There are four AA languages referred to under the more general term Khasi: Khasi itself, Pnar, Lyngnam and War. Khasi is the most important AA language of the Mon-Khmer branch in the north-eastern border state of Meghalaya. According to the 2011 Census of India report, it had 1,037,964 speakers in Meghalaya. It also had a few thousand speakers in Assam and Tripura states, and a few in Bangladesh. Census totals for Khasi of 1,431,344 in India and 12,421 in Bangladesh include all speakers of Pnar, Lyngnam and War. Khasi had no script until Serampore missionaries, during their stay in the Khasi Hills between 1813 and 1833, used Bangla script for writing this language. But “the Welsh Calvinistic Mission under Thomas Jones initiated the process of writing Khasi in Roman script” (Nagaraja, 2015, p. 1145) and this script is now in general use; it represents the Sohra or Cherrapunji dialect. Khasi has many very diverse dialects, including one called War. Pnar is another large AA language. This name is an endonym; two other names, Jaintia and Synteng, are exonyms. They are mainly in the West Jaintia Hills District in Meghalaya (319,324 according to the 2011 Census), with a few thousand in Assam and about 4,000 in Bangladesh. Though Pnar has structural differences from Khasi at every level, it is sometimes said to be a dialect of Khasi. Like Khasi, it is also written in a more recent Roman script; this is based on the Jowai dialect (Ring, 2015). The Lyngnam speakers are mainly in the Nongkulang region of Meghalaya. In India, the language had 11,586 speakers, including a few in Assam, also about a thousand in Bangladesh. Due to their close contact with TB Mandi/Garo, this community shows similarities in food and dress with them. War is the fourth AA language spoken in Meghalaya in India and in Sylhet in Bangladesh. It had 51,558 speakers in India according to the 2011 Census report. War is also sometimes called Jaintia, which is also an exonym for Pnar. It is sometimes confused with the War dialect of Khasi, or with Pnar, which are quite different. 192
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The Nicobarese AA languages are spoken on the various islands in this chain (Sidwell, 2022). Northernmost is Car, which is the most vital of the Nicobarese languages with about 40,000 speakers, is used as a lingua franca and is replacing several other languages further south. It is written with a romanisation. Chaura is spoken on Chaura Island by about 6,000 people but is endangered. Next is Tarasa/Bompoka with about 2,000 speakers, which is also endangered. Central Nicobarese, autonym Mūöt, also called Nancowry Nicobarese, is spoken in Nancowry, Katchali and some small nearby islands by about 6,000 people; this is quite vital, and has both a romanisation and a Devanagari script; there are very substantial internal dialect differences. The South Nicobarese language is spoken on Little Nicobar and most of Great Nicobar by about 7,500 people; this language is endangered. The final language is Shom Peng, with about 400 speakers in the hills of Great Nicobar; this was a hunter-gatherer group until recently. Car and Shom Peng are the most distinctive languages within this branch; the others are lexically fairly similar, perhaps partly due to contact. To sum up, the AA languages are spoken by only 1.11 per cent of the population of India, with some in Bangladesh and a few in Nepal. Most are bilingual in a local dominant language, and in many areas they are shifting to that language.
Other language families The Tai languages of India are concentrated in the northeast. Ahom is a heritage language of central Assam with a rich literature since 1228; about a million people identify as Ahom but speak Indic Assamese. Ahom priests still read manuscripts aloud but do not understand them. Ahom has not been spoken for at least two centuries, but since the early 1980s there are attempts at revival (Morey, 2014). The state of Assam is named after this group. Other Tai languages further east in northeast India are Nora and Tairong, no longer spoken; Khamyang, severely endangered; and Aiton, Phake and Khamti, still maintained by small groups; there are many Khamti speakers nearby in Burma. These languages are written in various Indic scripts derived from AA Mon via Burmese (Morey, 2002). All are Southwestern Tai; Thai and other foreign scholars have been active in their documentation, developing computer fonts for their scripts and supporting their maintenance. The Andamanese languages, with two main subgroups, were traditionally spoken by small hunter-gatherer groups. The Andamans were used as a penal colony by the British; from 1860, the local population was drastically reduced due to disease and displacement. The ten pre-contact languages of the northern islands are no longer spoken. Abbi (2013) reported five remaining speakers of a koine which includes elements of Khora, Jeru, Sare and Bo; she includes a thorough sociolinguistic survey. The rest of the very small remaining indigenous community of the northern and central Andamans speaks only Hindi. The distinctive languages of the south including Jarawa, Onge and Sentinelese are somewhat more vital, but Jarawa and Onge are endangered; Sentinelese is spoken in South Sentinel Island which is a closed reserve where no outsiders, not even Indian government officials, may go. The language isolate burushaski is spoken in two mountain valleys, Hunza/Nagar and Yasin, which were formerly very remote. Since 1979, the Karakoram highway from Pakistan to China runs through the Hunza/Nagar valley and contact has greatly increased, with a strong effect on language vitality and substantially increased use of Urdu. Kusunda is the Nepali name of a formerly hunter-gatherer group of about 200 in northwest Nepal. Their autonym is Mihaʔ and their language isolate is well-documented in Watters (2015). In 2004 there were seven or eight speakers, but this is now two at most; the language is being 193
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replaced by Nepali. The youngest fluent speaker is now over 50; since her mother’s passing, she has no one to speak Kusunda with. Nihali is a small former hunter-gatherer group between Burhanpur and Budana in central India whose language is misclassified as an AA Munda language by some scholars such as Anderson (2008). Less than half the ethnic Nihali population can speak this endangered language, documented by Nagaraja (2014).
Conclusion Most of the sociolinguistic work on the languages discussed has been on language policy, language vitality, ethnic identity and language contact effects including the development of various contact languages. There has been little work on variation. Concerning linguistic landscapes, apart from Dzongkha in Bhutan and Tibetan on various buildings associated with Tibetan Buddhism, TB, AA and the other languages discussed here are rarely seen in public signage. Much sociolinguistic work remains to be done in these areas.
References Abbi, A. (2013). A grammar of the Great Andamanese language, an ethnolinguistic study. Brill. Anderson, G. D. S. (2001). A new classification of the Munda languages: Evidence from comparative verb morphology. Indian Linguistics, 62, 21–36. Anderson, G. D. S. (Ed.). (2008). The Munda languages. Routledge. Andvik, E. E. (2010). A grammar of Tshangla. Brill. Ansaldo, U., & Lim, L. (2014). The lifecycle of Sri Lanka Malay. In H. Cardoso (Ed.), Language endangerment and preservation in South Asia [Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication 7] (pp. 100–118). University of Hawai’I Press. Bapuji, M. (2019). A descriptive grammar of Ollari Gadaba, an endangered Dravidian language [PhD thesis, University of Hyderabad]. Bernot, D. (1958). Rapports phonétiques entre le dialecte marma et le birman. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, 53(1), 273–294. Bernot, L. (1967). Les Cak, contribution à l’étude ethnographique d’une population de langue loi. Éditions du CNRS. Bhattacharya, S. (1957). Ollari, a Dravidian speech. Government of India. Bhattacharya, S. (1975). Studies in comparative Munda linguistics. Indian Institute of Indian Study. Bradley, D. (1997). Tibeto-Burman languages and classification. In D. Bradley (Ed.), Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas [Pacific Linguistics A-86] (pp. 1–71). Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. Bradley, D. (2021). Lisu in India. In T. Khan (Ed.), Alternative horizons in linguistics: A festchrift in honour of Prof. Panchanan Mohanty (pp. 58–64). Lincom. Burling, R. (2004). The language of the Modhupur Mandi (Garo) (2 Vols.). Bibliophile South Asia. Burrow, T., & Emeneau, M. B. (1984). A Dravidian etymological dictionary (2nd ed.). Clarendon Press. Cardoso, H. (2014). Factoring sociolinguistic variation into the history of Indo-Portuguese. Revista de Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola, 5, 87–114. Caughley, R. (2000). Dictionary of Chepang [Pacific Linguistics 502]. Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. Census of India, 2011. Language: India, states and union territories. Office of the Registrar General of India, Government of India. Chelliah, S. L. (1997). A grammar of Meithei. Mouton de Gruyter. Chhangte, L. (1993). Mizo syntax [PhD thesis, University of Oregon]. Coupe, A. R. (2007). A grammar of Mongsen Ao. Mouton de Gruyter. Fortier, J. (2019). Comparative dictionary of Raute and Rawat. Harvard University Press. Gawne, L. (2016). A sketch grammar of Lamjung Yolmo [Pacific Linguistics A-PL 30]. Asia-Pacific Linguistics.
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Sociolinguistics of South Asia Genetti, C. (2007). A grammar of Dolakha Newar. Mouton de Gruyter. Georg, S. (1996). Marpathan Thakali: Untersuchungen zur Sprache des Dorfes Marpha im Oberen KāliGandaki-Tal/Nepal. Lincom Europa. Griffiths, A. (2008). Gutob. In G. D. S. Anderson (Ed.), The Munda languages (pp. 633–681). Routledge. Hamid, A. (1998). Ladakhi-English-Urdu dictionary. Melong Publications. Hyslop, G. (2017). A grammar of Kurtöp. Brill. Jacquesson, F. (2015). An introduction to Sherdukpen. Brockmeyer. Joseph, U. V. (2007). Rabha. Brill. King, J. T. (2009). A grammar of Dhimal. Brill. Konnerth, L. (2020). A grammar of Karbi. De Gruyter Mouton. Masica, C. P. (1976). Defining a linguistic area: South Asia. University of Chicago Press. Michailovsky, B. (1989). La langue hayu. Éditions du CNRS. Modi, Y. (2017). The Milang language: Grammar and texts [PhD thesis, Bern University]. Modi, Y. (2022). Community language research. In J. J. P. Wouters & T. Subba (Eds.), The Routledge companion to Northeast India (pp. 81–86). Routledge. Mohanty, P. (2008). Dravidian substratum and Indo-Aryan languages. International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics XXXVII(1), 1–20. Mohanty, P., Kulkarni-Joshi, S., & Hasnain, I. (2013). Prolegomenon to the Bhil and Pawra relations in West Khandesh in Maharashtra: A reassessment of evidence for an early substratum. Indian Linguistics, 74(1–2), 95–104. Morey, S. (2002). Tai languages of Assam, a progress report: Does anything remain of the Tai Ahom language? In D. Bradley & M. Bradley (Eds.), Language endangerment and language maintenance (pp. 98–113). RoutledgeCurzon. Morey, S. (2010). Turung: A variety of Singpho language spoken in Assam [Pacific Linguistics 614]. Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. Morey, S. (2014). Ahom and Tangsa: Case studies of language maintenance and loss in North East India. In H. Cardoso (Ed.), Language endangerment and preservation in South Asia [Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication 7] (pp. 40–77). University of Hawai’i Press. Morey, S. (2017). The sociolinguistic context of the Tangsa languages. In P. S. Ding & J. Pelkey (Eds.), Sociohistorical linguistics in Southeast Asia, new horizons for tibeto-burman studies in honour of David Bradley (pp. 169–188). Brill. Nagaraja, K. S. (2014). The Nihali language. Central Institute of Indian Languages. Nagaraja, K. S. (2015). Standard Khasi. In M. Jenny & P. Sidwell (Eds.), The handbook of Austroasiatic languages (Vol. 2, pp. 1145–1185). Brill. Nagaraja, K. S., & Mankodi, K. (Eds.). (2010). Austroasiatic linguistics. Central Institute of Indian Languages. Noonan, M. (1999). Chantyal dictionary and texts. Mouton de Gruyter. Pinnow, H.-J. (1963). The position of the Munda languages within the Austroasiatic language family. In H. L. Shorto (Ed.), Linguistic comparison in Southeast Asia and the pacific (pp. 142–152). School of Oriental and African Studies. Plaisier, H. (2007). A grammar of Lepcha. Brill. Regmi, A. (2013). A grammar of Magar Kaike. Lincom. Ring, H. (2015). A grammar of Pnar [PhD thesis, Nanyang Technological University]. Saxena, A. (2022). The linguistic landscape of the Indian Himalayas: Languages in Kinnaur. Brill. Saxena, A., & Borin, L. (2022). Synchronic and diachronic aspects of Kanashi. De Gruyter Mouton. Shapiro, M. C., & Schiffman, H. F. (1981). Language and society in South Asia. Motilal Bararsidass. Sharma, S. R. (2007). Byangsi grammar and vocabulary. Deccan College Postgraduate Research Institute. Sidwell, P. (2022). A classification of the Nicobarese languages. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 15(1), 1–16. Sprigg, R. K. (2002). Balti-English English-Balti dictionary. RoutledgeCurzon. Tamsang, K. P. (1980). The Lepcha-English encyclopaedic dictionary. Mani Press. Turin, M. (2012). A grammar of the Thangmi language. Brill. van Driem, G. (1987). A grammar of Limbu. Mouton de Gruyter. van Driem, G., with Tsering, K. (1998). Dzongkha. Research School CNWS. Watters, D. E. (2002). A grammar of Kham. Cambridge University Press. Watters, D. E. (2015). Notes on Kusunda grammar. National Foundation for the Development of Indigenous Nationalities.
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David Bradley and Panchanan Mohanty Widmer, M. (2014). A descriptive grammar of Bunan [PhD thesis, Bern University]. Willis Oko, C. M. (2019). A grammar of Darma. Brill. Zide, N., & Zide, A. (1976). Proto-Munda cultural vocabulary: Evidence on early agriculture. In P. N. Jenner, L. C. Thompson, & Starosta, S. (Eds.), Austroasiatic studies part II (pp. 1295–1334). University of Hawai’I Press.
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15 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN MONGOLIA Bolormaa Shinjee and Sender Dovchin
Introduction Mongolia, one of the last surviving nomadic nations in the world and the second-largest landlocked country after Kazakhstan, is in the heart of Central Asia between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The capital city of Mongolia is Ulaanbaatar, located in the north-central part of the country. The official language of Mongolia is Mongolian, spoken by 95% of the population. Until the 13th century, when Genghis Khan established Mongolia by uniting most of the Mongol clans, the Mongols were a loose confederation of rival tribes. Genghis Khan expanded Mongolia, sweeping through much of Asia, and established the Great Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous land empire. The Great Mongol Empire continued to expand until 1691 when the Manchu invaded Mongolia and took control until 1911 (Manchu rule is also known as the Qing dynasty in world history – see Rossabi, 2005). The Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, and Mongolia sought to declare its independence, which was not recognized by the Republic of China. Consequently, Mongolia developed a close alliance with communist Russia, expelling Chinese troops during the fall of the Qing dynasty. In 1921, Mongolia declared its independence again, celebrated as the anniversary of the people’s revolution (Weatherford, 2005). The newly formed Mongolian People’s Republic was proclaimed in 1924, and the newly renamed Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar (‘Red Hero’), was established. Correspondingly, the ‘Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party’ (MPRP), the longest reigning political party in the history of Mongolia (ruling between 1921 and 1996), came into being under rising Soviet pressure. Over the next 70 years, Mongolia became a satellite of the Soviet Union under communist rule (Wickhamsmith & Marzluf, 2021). During this socialist period, western cultural and linguistic elements were strictly banned by the ruling communist party. The Russian language was the most popular foreign language in Mongolia, taught as a compulsory subject in tertiary and higher education institutions (Namsrai, 2004; Cohen, 2004). More dramatically, the traditional Mongolian Uyghur script (written vertically) was replaced by Russian Cyrillic in the early 1940s, and the Cyrillic orthographic system has been the standard Mongolian orthographic system since then (Batchuluun, 1996; Cohen, 2004). By the late 1980s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ruling communist authorities of Mongolia resigned without confrontation, undoubtedly marking the end of 70 years of communist rule. Mongolia peacefully transformed itself from a socialist to a democratic society, and it was the 197
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beginning of a new social, political, and economic order for the newly democratic Mongolia. Since 1990, Mongolia has quickly opened its internal and external market to the rest of the world, allowing financial liberalization through a free-market economy (Marzluf & Saruul-Erdene, 2019). Correspondingly, the sociolinguistic scene in post-socialist Mongolia has rapidly changed due to the inevitable effects of an open society. The popularity of the Russian language has been replaced by English and other additional global languages such as French, German, Korean, Japanese, and others. With the emergence of the information and technology era, the sociolinguistic landscape in post-socialist Mongolia has rapidly evolved (Marsh, 2010). In this chapter, we will discuss the current sociolinguistic scene in Mongolia, outlining some of the critical sociolinguistic transformations since 1990. In so doing, we will summarize the internal and external sociolinguistic backgrounds by providing insights into the minority language, bi/multilingual contexts, new language ideologies, and future directions of sociolinguistics in Mongolia.
Internal sociolinguistic background Today, the official language of Mongolia is Mongolian, spoken by 95% of the population, mainly consisting of the majority ethnic group in Mongolia – Khalkha Mongolians (Yagi, 2020). While the majority ethnic group in Mongolia is Khalkha Mongolians, the second-largest ethnic group in Mongolia is the Kazakh people (5%). Khalkha Mongolians mainly practice Tibetan Buddhism, while Kazakhs exercise Islam. Over 100,000 Kazakh Mongolians currently live in Mongolia, particularly in Bayan-Ulgii province, the far western part of Mongolia. Bayan-Ulgii province was established as ‘a culturally autonomous area’ in 1940. Since then, the Kazakhs have been allowed to use their language – the Kazakh language, one of the Turkic root languages – which is the dominant language in Bayan-Ulgii province (Soni, 2008; Barcus & Werner, 2010). The Kazakhs in Mongolia were also provided with opportunities to utilize their language as the medium of instruction in primary, secondary, and upper secondary schools, while the Mongolian language was introduced as a second language. There were few educated Kazakhs when the Bayan-Ulgii province was established as a particular administrative unit by the government of Mongolia. The Mongolian authorities, thus, brought Kazakh-speaking teachers and adopted educational curriculums from Soviet Kazakhstan, where most subjects were taught in Kazakh. In a similar vein to Mongolians, Kazakhs adopted Cyrillic letters until 1990, when their traditional Arabic script was reintroduced to reconnect with their roots, thanks to democratization (Soni, 2008). Kazakhs in Mongolia have their own newspaper, radio programs, and television broadcasts in the Kazakh language, and thus can use Kazakh to practice their linguistic and cultural identity. Mongolian Kazakhs continue to practice their folk songs, mourning, or ‘lamenting’ – all of which are inseparable spiritual cultures of this minority ethnic group, despite the socio-economic changes in Mongolia (Soni, 2008). As a result of Mongolian government policy acknowledging their ‘long tradition and heritage culture’, Mongolian Kazakhs have preserved their language and culture to a greater extent than other Kazakhs residing in other countries around the world (Dovchin & Pennycook, 2017). Nevertheless, as opposed to the constitution of Mongolia which declares the rights of ethnic minorities, there are some controversial issues relating to unequal access to education and opportunities for employment, due to cultural and language differences between the majority Khalkha groups and the minority Kazakh groups. Thus, the Mongolian Kazakhs face linguistic barriers and challenges in fitting into personal and professional environments, where a native level of Mongolian language is often required in workplaces and educational institutions (Canagarajah & Dovchin, 2019). Many Mongolian Kazakhs are still socially disadvantaged compared with the majority 198
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Mongolian Khalkha group, as they have less opportunity to access higher education institutions or obtain high-ranking jobs, and are required to pass official Mongolian language tests. The official Mongolian orthographic system is Russian Cyrillic, which was first introduced in Mongolia in 1940 by the Soviet Union. Before 1990, Soviet ideology was normally challenging traditional Mongolian heritage and culture. For example, all talk of Genghis Khan, the Emperor of the Great Mongol Empire, was effectively prohibited, and any public statements about him were avoided, as the USSR urged Mongolians to reassess Genghis Khan and the Mongolian Empire (Rossabi, 2005). In line with this strict Soviet order, the official orthographic system of Mongolia – the classical Mongolian Uyghur script, which dates back to the Great Mongol Empire, was replaced by the Russian Cyrillic script (Grivelet, 1995). Evidently, the Uyghur script was quietly used by ordinary Mongolians, mostly for personal notes. However, the Russian Cyrillic script entirely replaced the Uyghur script as the official orthographic system of Mongolia, which is still the current standard written system of Mongolia. Understandably, after 1990, democratization enabled Mongolians to reconnect with their heritage and tradition, while restoring their historical and cultural resources. The new Mongolian government attempted to reintroduce the Uyghur script to replace the Cyrillic system. The Parliament made resolution No. 64 in 1994 to adopt the Uyghur script for official affairs from 1995 and reintroduce the script into the general secondary school curriculum, teaching from first to fourth grade. Nevertheless, this resolution also caused a debate in the Parliament. The main political leaders supported the necessity of restoring the Uyghur script, but they could not agree on when, how, and to what extent to start teaching the classic script. Accordingly, two public opinion polls were distributed: one by the parliament study group, and another one by academics in 1994. The polls found that 11.25% of the participants supported the use of the Uyghur script, whereas the majority (87.32%) supported the Cyrillic script (Grivelet, 1995). As a result, the Parliament proposed to postpone the reintroduction of the Uyghur script until 2001, leaving time to consider both the necessity to keep the old script, as well as the popularity of the Cyrillic script. Today, the government’s ambition is to introduce Uyghur script to all secondary schools and to produce all official announcements written both in Uyghur and Cyrillic by 2025. The former President of Mongolia, Battulga Khaltmaa, broadcasted his Uyghur script lessons on national television during the pandemic period in 2020 to encourage Mongolian people to learn and use the traditional writing, which is evidence of the government’s willingness to promote and preserve the script at the national level.
External sociolinguistic background During the socialist period (1921–1990), Mongolia was isolated from the world apart from former socialist countries such as The Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, The Republic of Cuba, The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and The German Democratic Republic. The Russian language was the most popular language during this period, and it was mandatory for secondary education (Namsrai, 2004). There were many Russian-medium secondary schools with Russian expatriate teachers, coordinated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia (Namsrai, 2004). The Russian language was also extensively taught across tertiary education sectors and was required for university entrance exams and job entries. By 1940, 739 Mongolian students had graduated from universities in the Soviet Union (Nyamdoljin, 2018). In the late 1980s, Mongolian authorities had sent 1300 teachers from Mongolia to Russia to gain qualifications for teaching Russian as a second language in Mongolia (Namsrai, 2004). With the collapse of the communist regime in Mongolia, the usage of Russian in Mongolia decreased dramatically. It lost its prestige, and, more dramatically, the Russian teachers in 199
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Mongolia were retrained to become English teachers (Cohen, 2004). Unsurprisingly, there is still a large number of words, terms, and expressions, which have been adopted locally from the Russian language to the system of the Mongolian language. They are still widely used as part of Mongolian syntax and lexicology (Dovchin, 2018; Marzluf & Saruul-Erdene, 2019). Nevertheless, the status of the Russian language started regaining momentum once more from the 2000s. The strategic partnership between Mongolia and Russia was strengthened due to the geostrategic importance of the two countries (Krishna, 2018). The number of Mongolian students learning the Russian language started increasing dramatiically due to Russian government scholarships and other oil and gas business opportunities with Russia. For example, 2760 Mongolian students received university scholarships between 2000–2013, and the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, promised to increase the annual number of government scholarships up to 1000 during his official visit in 2014 to Mongolia (Nyamdoljin, 2018). During this period, cooperation between Mongolian and Russian universities expanded, and four branches of Russian universities were established in Mongolia within the last decade. Meanwhile, the emergence of English and other foreign languages in post-socialist Mongolia has been an inevitable sociolinguistic transformation since 1990. With extended bilateral and multilateral relations with other global countries and growing interest in technology and science, English, followed by other foreign languages, has become an essential part of the external sociolinguistic background in current Mongolia. Because of Mongolia’s increasing access to the global cultural and technological circuit, including the Internet and digital technology, and its open-border policy, English and other foreign languages have started circulating significantly across both institutional and informal settings. In particular, English has become the most popular foreign language in Mongolia. In the next section, we will discuss the status and role of English in contemporary Mongolia.
English in Mongolia Since 1990, Mongolians have started associating the role of English with globalization, and access to the rest of the world. During the transition period from socialism to democracy, the Mongolian government started promoting multiple language programs and policies to place English as the main means of communication, education, and business in Mongolia. However, the overall English proficiency and English skill level of the mainstream population in Mongolia have not necessarily reached the level of expectation that the Mongolian government had initially hoped (Cohen, 2004). The proper development and planning of English language education policy lacked certainty and accuracy, while the demand for English requirements across public and private businesses started to dramatically increase (Orosoo & Jamiyansuren, 2021). The Mongolian Government issued a resolution in 2008, approving the National Program of English language learning and teaching between 2009 and 2020. This resolution states that English language teaching shall be organized in accordance with the basic competencies of the mother tongue, and the main foreign language taught at all levels of education will be the English language (Ministry of Education and Science, 2021). Furthermore, the action plan on promoting the quality of English language teaching was approved by the decree of the Minister of Education and Sciences on 7 May 2021 within the framework of ‘Vision-2050’, which is expected to be discussed by the Parliament of Mongolia in mid-2022. The implementation of this action plan is expected to form the basis of future policies and measures for English language education in Mongolia and may create further conditions and terms for the participation of English instruction in educational institutions, governmental and non-governmental organizations, teachers, and students in Mongolia (Ministry of Education and Science, 2021). 200
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Meanwhile, English has been playing a significant role in non-institutional settings of postsocialist Mongolia (Gundsambuu, 2019). Particularly, English has started playing a leading role in the contexts of media, technology, and popular culture. The popularity of English-Mongolian bilingual websites, social media outlets, broadcasting programs, newspapers, journals, podcasts, and popular culture resources is widespread (Marav et al., 2020). The linguistic landscape of the capital city – Ulaanbaatar (e.g., street signs, restaurant menus, etc.) – is largely constructed by English or English-oriented resources. During the socialist regime, listening to English songs was literally prohibited as it was considered to be a capitalist linguistic element (Kim, 2021). After the change to democracy, a majority of Mongolians started enjoying popular music based on English in all its fantastic dimensions. Since the early 2000s, Mongolian musical artists started combining and mixing different languages with English playing the primary role, as English names, titles, and lyrics were largely incorporated into Mongolian songs (Dovchin, 2018). Band names in English (e.g., The Lemons, The Colors, Growl of Clown, Silhouette Tuesday, Teresa in the Moon, Die in Despair, Black Zip, Nomadic Reggae, Even Tide) can be seen in the artist list of the biggest music festival ‘Playtime 2022’, which takes place every year in the capital city. A new type of ‘Monglish’ – a combination between English and Mongolian, has started emerging out of a complex linguistic process in which English linguistic resources are profoundly absorbed into the Mongolian language, producing multiple new local expressions and new meanings (Tankosić & Dovchin, 2022). Consider the following example, in which Mongolian social media users are using the examples of ‘Monglish’ (Tankosić & Dovchin, 2022).
Here, the ‘live’ function of Facebook has been Mongolianized into the Cyrillic Mongolian verb ‘хийх’ (‘to do’) producing the Monglish term, ‘лайв хийх’, meaning ‘to do Facebook live’; and the Facebook-default term, ‘share’, which refers to the activity of sharing photos, links, locations, and updates on one’s Facebook, has been combined with the Mongolian suffix, ‘-leerei’ (‘please’), creating another example of ‘Monglish’’shareleerei (‘please share’) (Tankosić & Dovchin, 2022, p. 16). The role of English here demonstrates that Internet labels have been around long enough that Mongolian users already consider them a part of their own sociolinguistic practice and seem comfortable and familiar using the examples of ‘Monglish’.
Other Foreign languages Since democratization in Mongolia, ‘a language boom’ has taken place across all sectors of society. Particularly, foreign languages such as Chinese, Korean, Turkish, German, and Japanese have started quickly spreading across the country. During the socialist period, there was only one national broadcaster, and only Russian television programs were available to Mongolians. Today, there are more than 150 channels and broadcasters in urban and rural areas available now (Communications Regularity Commission of Mongolia, 2022). Those various programs are in English, Japanese, German, Russian, Spanish, and French. The Mongolian government has been implementing a ‘third neighbor’ policy since 1990, and many other donor countries are offering 201
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educational scholarships and other aid programs, which have raised the interest in learning those languages. As a result, many private secondary schools have foreign languages as their medium of instruction, varying from Chinese, Korean, Turkish, German, and Japanese in addition to English and Russian (Marzluf & Saruul-Erdene, 2019; Dovchin, 2018). International language tests such as International English Language Testing System (IELTS), Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), and Pearson Test of English for English, the Deutsche Sprachprüfung für den Hochschulzugang (DSH) certificates for German, the Korean-language Proficiency Test (KLPT), the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) for Japanese, and the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) exam for Chinese are used extensively for academic and non-academic purposes, and the preparation courses for these international language tests are taught in both institutional and noninstitutional settings (Gundsambuu, 2019). Each language has its own specific association with Mongolia. For example, human mobility between Mongolia and South Korea has rapidly expanded. South Korea has, in recent years, become one of the largest aid donors and important trading partners for Mongolia, and one of the most significant projects is the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), which offers undergraduate and graduate scholarship programs to Mongolian students. The basic requirement for this scholarship program is to pass the Korean-language proficiency test. In the scope of the Memorandum of Mutual Understanding on Dispatching and Receiving Labor Force in accordance with the Employment Permit System, there are approximately 5000 Mongolian citizens currently working under this program in Korea (Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Mongolia, 2021). As a result, Seoul hosts one of the largest Mongolian expatriate communities globally, while South Korean merchants, businessmen, academics, tourists, and Christian missionaries have become long-term residents of Ulaanbaatar (cf. Tankosić & Dovchin, 2021). This mutual relationship has strongly reinforced the popularity of the linguistic and cultural resources of South Korea in Mongolia, including Korean TV dramas, K-pop, and Korean food. In addition, Korean linguistic resources have started integrating into the Mongolian colloquial language system. There are many Korean words adopted from Korean soap-operas in Mongolia. Consider the following example, where the Korean traditional dish name, ‘tteokbokki’ [떡볶이], a spicy Korean ‘snack’ food has been Mongolianized as ‘dogbugi’, which is based on the Mongolian phonetic system. In this social media example, ‘Hamgiin goy dogbugitoi gazar yuve manaihaan’ [‘Where do they sell the best dogbugi’] This is the combination of the Korean root word, ‘dogbugi’, embedded within the Mongolian prepositional suffix ‘toi’ [‘with’] and the Mongolian caricatured accent of ‘tteokbokki’ as ‘dogbugi’ Dryden & Dovchin (2021). Another popular foreign language in modern Mongolia is Japanese, due to the popularity of Japanese cultural forms in Mongolia. Just like South Korea, human mobility between the two countries increased the interest to learn the Japanese language for Mongolians. The Human Resource Development Scholarship by Japanese Grant Aid (JDS) started in Mongolia in 2001, awarding 400 fellows with postgraduate degrees from Japanese universities. The popularity of Japanese has increased rapidly due to the recognition of Japanese sumo in Mongolia. Many young male Mongolians started going to Japan to become sumo wrestlers, a momentum which made sumo very popular in Mongolia (Dovchin et al., 2017). Since 2003, Mongolian-born Japanese sumo wrestlers have become the highest-ranking champions (Yokozuna) in Japan, including Hakuho (Munkhbat Davaajargal), a retired professional sumo wrestler, who became one of the most iconic sumo wrestlers in Japan. The sumo tournaments have been broadcasted live across Mongolia for Mongolians to enjoy and cheer for their favourite sumo wrestlers, which has caused the emergence of ‘sumotized Mongolian’ and ‘sumo-driven’ linguistic meanings in Mongolia (Dovchin, 2018, p. 121). For example, the Japanese root expression, ‘初場所’ [‘hatsu basho’], an opening 202
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tournament of professional Japanese Sumo wrestling, and the Japanese root expression ‘突っ張り’ [‘tsuppari’], the action of delivering a fast strike with the palm of the hand to the opponent’s face, are commonly used phrases across sumo fans in Mongolia.
Language ideologies in Mongolia Due to these new external sociolinguistic environments in post-socialist Mongolia, new confronting language ideologies have started emerging. Two major language ideologies – ‘linguistic diversity’ and ‘linguistic dystopia’ – are observed in post-socialist Mongolia (Dovchin, 2018). The main ethos of linguistic diversity is to celebrate and welcome the diversity of languages in the society as they bring multiple social, educational and financial opportunities (Canagarajah, 2005). Linguistic diversity is, therefore, highly celebrated by Mongolians as a key to prosperity, which can be clearly seen from the latest resolution by the Minister of Education and Science of Mongolia within the framework of ‘Vision-2050’ (Ministry of Education and Science, Mongolia, 2021). In this resolution, an ideology of ‘linguistic diversity’ is highlighted as a vital form of ‘modernization’ and success in all aspects of society. Meanwhile, the ideology of linguistic dystopia has also been harshly criticized for distorting the Mongolian language by some linguists and policymakers in Mongolia, where ‘purist’ ideology is widespread (Dovchin, 2018). In 2003, the Law on the State Language was passed by the Parliament of Mongolia to create a legal environment and prevent the Mongolian language from linguistic and cultural aggression of foreign languages. In 2015, the National Council for Language Policy was established under the President’s Office, and some duties of the council were to discuss and (dis)approve the translation of foreign terms and discourses.
Future directions The sociolinguistic scene in post-socialist Mongolia has become one of the country’s most critical phenomena since its transformation into democracy in 1990. It is much more common to see linguistic amalgamation and mixtures, loan translations and calques, and phonetic/grammatical change in the post-socialist context of Mongolia than in its previous socialist incarnation (Tankosić & Dovchin, 2022). In a new digital era, with a new free-market economy and a democratic society, Mongolia has started experimenting immensely with new digital media. Pennycook (2010) draws our attention to understanding language and diversity from the perspective of ‘relocalization’ – the practice in which language repertories can be incorporated into other language resources and become recontextualized and ‘localized’ by making new local meanings and new linguistic features. Language users are the creators of new meanings as they produce novel expressions and repertories by re-modifying and re-transforming linguistic forms in different and new contextual dimensions (Axelsson et al., 2003). It is, for example, almost impossible to label social mediabased terminologies as a ‘foreign language’ in Mongolia, as they have been profoundly ‘relocalized’ into the local language systems (Dovchin, 2017, 2018), which are ‘imported into local systems of meaningfulness’ and ‘remain as local as before’ (Blommaert, 2010, p. 79). English and other languages have been relocalized to different societal and linguistic contexts, especially on digital media – not because the language is transforming itself, but because of the language practices of the Mongolian language users (Dovchin & Lee, 2019). Facebook and other social networking sites are consistently working on translations to other languages, and English terminology is being ‘relocalized’ to other alphabets, orthographies, as well as morphosyntactic and phonological features to enrich the lexis of local languages (Sultana & Dovchin, 2021). 203
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Overall, there is a need to re-explore how Mongolians relocalize English and other languages in different ways in their desires, aspirations, and daily lives, and how such relocalization processes contribute to the overall sociolinguistic processes of understanding those languages within the current digitally active environment. More research is needed in terms of the dynamics of both internal and external sociolinguistic practices of Mongolia, including the role of other popular foreign languages besides English and Russian, and their harmony or tension with other minority ethnic languages of Mongolia. This means that the underlying assumptions embedded within popular language ideologies in Mongolia – linguistic dystopia and linguistic diversity – should be revisited in the future, creating alternative sociolinguistic thinking of understanding the linguistic situations in modern Mongolia.
References Axelsson, A. S., Abelin, Å., & Schroeder, R. (2003). Anyone speak Spanish? Language encounters in multiuser virtual environments and the influence of technology. New Media & Society, 5(4), 475–498. Barcus, H., & Werner, C. (2010). The Kazakhs of Western Mongolia: Transnational migration from 1990– 2008. Asian Ethnicity, 11(2), 209–228. Batchuluun, D. (1996). Learning English in Mongolia: Interference from the Native language. Mongolian Studies, 19, 69–78. Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge University Press. Bolat, A. (2016). The Kazakh minority in Mongolia: Falconry as a symbol of Kazakh identity. Senri Ethnological Studies, 93, 107–125. Canagarajah, A. S. (2005). Reclaiming the local in language policy and practice. Routledge. Canagarajah, A. S., & Dovchin, S. (2019). The everyday politics of translingualism as a resistant practice. International Journal of Multilingualism, 16(2), 127–144. http://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2019.1575833 Cohen, R. (2004). The current status of English education in Mongolia. Asian EFL Journal, 6(4), 1–21. Communications Regulatory Commision of Mongolia. (2022). https://crc.gov.mn/en Dovchin, S. (2017). The role of English in the language practices of Mongolian Facebook users: English meets Mongolian on social media. English Today, 33(2), 16–24. Dovchin, S. (2018). Language, media and globalization in the periphery: The linguascapes of popular music in Mongolia. Routledge. Dovchin, S., & Lee, J. W. (2019). Introduction to special issue: ‘The ordinariness of translinguistics’. International Journal of Multilingualism, 16(2), 105–111. Dovchin, S., & Pennycook, A. (2017). Digital metroliteracies. In K. A. Mills, A. Stornaiuolo, A. Smith, & J. Z. Pandya (Eds.), Handbook of writing, literacies, and education in digital cultures (p. 24). Routledge. Dovchin, S., Pennycook, A., & Sultana, S. (2017). Popular culture, voice and linguistic diversity: Young adults on-and offline. Springer. Dryden, S., & Dovchin, S. (2021). Accentism: English LX users of migrant background in Australia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1–13. (Early online.) Grivelet, S. (1995). Reintroducing the Uighur-Mongolian script in Mongolia Today. Mongolian Studies, 18, 49–60. www.jstor.org/stable/43193217 Gundsambuu, S. (2019). Internationalization and English as a medium of instruction in Mongolian higher education. IAFOR Journal of Education, 7(1), 71–92. Kim, T. Y. (2021). History of English learning and its motivation in other East Asian countries. In Historical development of English learning motivation research (pp. 151–213). Springer. Krishna, V. (2018). Expanding vistas of Mongolia-Russia strategic partnership since 2000 Ulaanbaatar Declaration. Mongolian Journal of International Affairs, 20, 101–114. Marav, D., Podorova, A., Yadamsuren, O., & Bishkhorloo, B. (2020). Teaching global English in a local context: Teachers’ realities in Mongolian public schools. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 1–14. Marsh, P. K. (2010). Our generation is opening its eyes: Hip-hop and youth identity in contemporary Mongolia. Central Asian Survey, 29(3), 345–358. Marzluf, P., & Saruul-Erdene, M. (2019). Language education policy. In A. Kirkpatrick, & A. J. Liddicoat (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of language education policy in Asia (p. 137). Routledge. Ministry of Education and Science. (2021, May 7). Action plan of improvement of quality of English language teaching and learning in Mongolia. www.meds.gov.mn
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Sociolinguistics in Mongolia Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Mongolia. (2021). Agreement between Mongolia and the Republic of Korea on social security. https://mlsp.gov.mn/uploads/files/02_mongol_korea_kor_mon_agreement_2006.pdf Namsrai, M. (2001). The communicative approach in Mongolia. Asian Englishes, 4(1), 80–85. Namsrai, M. (2004). English language curriculum standards. Mongolian Ministry of Education Culture and Science. Nyamdoljin, A. (2018). Cooperation perspectives on education sector of Mongolia-Russia. Journal of International Studies, 41–51. Orosoo, M., & Jamiyansuren, B. (2021). Language in education planning: Evaluation policy in Mongolia. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 17(3). Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. Routledge. Rossabi, M. (2005). Modern Mongolia: From Khans to commissars to capitalists. University of California Press. Soni, S. K. (2002). Mongolia-Russia relations: Kiakhta to Vladivostok. Shipra Publications. Soni, S. K. (2008). Mongolian Kazakh diaspora: Study of largest ethnic minority in Mongolia. Bimonthly Journal of Mongolian and Tibetan Current Situation (Taipei, Taiwan), 17(3), 31–49. Sultana, S., & Dovchin, S. (2021). Relocalization in digital language practices of university students in Asian peripheries: Critical awareness in a language classroom. Linguistics and Education, 62, 100752. Tankosić, A., & Dovchin, S. (2021). The impact of social media in the sociolinguistic practices of the peripheral post-socialist contexts. International Journal of Multilingualism, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/1479 0718.2021.1917582 Tankosić, A., & Dovchin, S. (2022). Monglish in post‐communist Mongolia. World Englishes, 41(1), 38–53. Weatherford, J. (2005). Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world. Broadway Books. Wickham-Smith, S., & Marzluf, P. P. (Eds.). (2021). Socialist and post-socialist Mongolia. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Yagi, F. (2020). Systematization of Kazakh music in Mongolia: Activities of theater and radio station during the Soviet era. Asian Ethnicity, 21(3), 413–424.
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16 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN JAPAN Florian Coulmas
Introduction When the Western paradigm of sociolinguistics arrived in Japan in the late 1960s, it was not much new for Japanese students of language who had known for a long time that language did not exist but in human society. They did not call it “sociolinguistics”, but at least since the hastened modernisation of the country in the Meiji period (1868–1912) they had ardently studied various problems of language-society relations. Language standardisation, the establishment of the Tokyo dialect as basis of the national language, its relationship to other dialects, the unification of spoken and written language, script reform, social change and change in honorific language use were topics academics and politicians alike understood to be important for the nation. That there was a strong connection between the state of the language and national development was a belief shared by many. Even the use of English was on the agenda, after the young chargé d’affaires to Washington Mori Arinori, aged 23, in 1872, in a letter to linguist William D. Whitney, had proposed adopting “a copious and expanding European language” in Japan (Kawasumi, 1978, p. 47). The language planning movement for the unification of the spoken and written language (genbun itchi undō) was a weighty social issue because the wide gap between the vernacular and the written language clad in classical styles of Chinese and Japanese was thought to stand in the way of spreading general education and a popular press (Twine, 1991, Chapter 3). In 1900, the Japanese government set up a Genbun Itchi Committee headed by Hisoka Maejima, an influential politician who, among other things, founded the Japanese postal service. This can be considered a representative event in that language problems close to society have garnered the attention not only of scholars but also of the government which as in this case created institutional frameworks to deal with them. The National Language Inquiry Board (Kokugo chōsakai) established under the auspices of the Ministry of Education in 1902, to be replaced in 1934 by the National Language Council (Kokugo shingikai), was an important corner stone. Other institutions followed, charged, for example, with promoting the Japanese language abroad. From the mid-Meiji years until the end of Japan’s brief experience as a colonial power, spreading the Japanese language was closely linked to assimilationist policies, both in Japan, vis-à-vis the Ainu and the Ryukyūans, and in overseas territories, especially in Taiwan and Korea, and, however briefly, in the East Indies. The promotion of the national language closely tied to nationalism had been a major government concern with language for some time, and in the 1940s it stifled research in other language related fields. DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-19 206
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After the war, independent research became once again possible; however, many of the aforementioned topics were taken up again, and the government maintained an active interest in matters of language and society. This was most noticeably embodied in the foundation in 1948 of the National Language Research Institute (Kokuritsu kokugo kenkyūsho) without which sociolinguistics in Japan would not be what it is.
The National Language Research Institute and “language life” As its name suggests, the National Language Research Institute was a national establishment focussed entirely on the national language. In 2009 it was turned into an independent administrative agency since known internationally as National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL). On NINJAL’s website, the research approach developed and represented by the institute is characterised as follows: The first keyword of the institute that conducts such new national language research is “language life”. This expresses the idea of looking at the appearance and functions of language used in daily life, rather than studying language only as language. The term “language life” already existed, but it was Minoru Nishio, the first director, who took it up as a particularly important research topic. Research from this perspective later developed into a field widely called “sociolinguistics”. The term “language life”, gengo seikatsu, epitomised the Japanese approach to the systematic and above all empirical study of language in society that had come into existence in the first half of the twentieth century (Nagano, 1957). The most remarkable feature of this line of research were large-scale surveys that documented variation and change, some of which, such as the Tsuruoka multiple-wave standardisation study (Yoneda, 1997) observed the same subjects over as many as six decades, shedding new light on individual language change of adults. Gengo seikatsu also became the title of the monthly journal of the institute published from 1951 in 436 issues. When it was terminated in 1988, the print run was still 7000, which is testimony to the general interest in language questions in Japan at the time. However, within the scientific community westerneducated linguists had come to the fore who insisted that sociolinguistics (shakai gengogaku) was a new field of research rather than just a new name of language-life studies. Heinrich (2002) has investigated the history of the concept and shown that behind the quarrel about labels lay disagreements between two schools of thought, the language life nativists and the sociolinguist internationalists. From the point of view of the history of science, it is interesting to note that although scientists prefer to consider themselves solely committed to the search for truth, they follow ideological precepts of the zeitgeist. Those Japanese scholars who viewed language life-studies as coterminous with Japanese sociolinguistics had good reasons to do so. In 1985, Takesi Sibata, one of the most original and prolific linguists of his generation (Kunihiro et al., 1999; Inoue, 1998), stated it bluntly: “The study of gengo seikatsu is Japanese sociolinguistics. Japanese seikatsu ‘life’ represents neither ‘animate existence’ nor ‘lifetime’, but rather ‘manner of social existence’” (Sibata, 1985, p. 79). The “manner of social existence” of language – what better general definition of what sociolinguistics is all about? However, what exactly the social existence of language encompasses and what aspects of it sociolinguists should pay attention to can be controversial. And it is here that contemporary Japanese sociolinguistics most conspicuously differs from traditional language life-studies. 207
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Expanding the research agenda These differences could be presented as expected by-products of the evolution of the discipline, but for reasons more to do with vanity than sober contemplation, perception more than reality, they were treated as a paradigm shift. To be sure, the research agenda of today’s sociolinguists differs in many ways from that of their predecessors half a century ago. Could anything else be expected? It wasn’t just out of disinterest that language life-studies did not or only rarely examine language contact, minority languages, multilingualism, language endangerment, and similar topics; in a sense, these topics were beyond the horizon. The self-image of Japan promoted by the government after its empire was lost in World War II and embraced by large parts of society including intellectuals was that of an ethnically homogenous (tanitsu minzoku) and socially unstratified society, the so-called 100 million middle class-society (ichi oku sōchūryū shakai). Takesi Sibata, quoted earlier, is once again witness to the effectiveness of the ideology: Japan is a monolingual, monocultural, and monoethnic country. Japanese people speak only Japanese, and other languages are not spoken in Japan. Thus no item for the establishment of an official language can be found in the Constitution of Japan. It is self-evident that there is no need to select and establish an official language. (Sibata, 1985, p. 88) Citing Sibata here once again is not to depreciate his work; the reason is rather that he was the most eminent representative of his generation and as such still not immune to the intellectual currents of his time. Realities and perceptions have changed since, and the exigencies and trends of research are different in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
Sociolinguistic Sciences and Language and Society A decade after Gengo seikatsu ceased publication, two new journals were founded, entitled Shakai gengo kagaku (Sociolinguistic Sciences (1999)) and Kotoba to shakai (Language and Society (1999)). Looking at the first issues of both journals certain differences in orientation are apparent, which could be described as focussed on Japan, the former, and directed outward, the latter. The Japanese Association of Sociolinguistic Sciences, JASS, declares on its website: “This society takes up language and communication in relation to human beings, culture, and society, and aims to clarify related problems that exist there”. By emphasising communication, the association signals continuity with language life-studies, while the inclusion of kagaku “sciences” in its title recognises the fact that such studies are more scientific nowadays than they formerly were. The plural form, sciences , indicates recognition of the contributions of various disciplines to a comprehensive understanding of the social nature of language, such as social psychology, developmental psychology, informatics and media studies, and ethnology. The range of topics dealt with in the association’s journal Shakai gengo kagaku is wide, but strongly focussed on Japanese. Prominent topics are dialects, honorific language, terminology, lexical policy, writing system, and language education, among others. Languages other than Japanese are occasionally dealt with, too. Having had resident speech communities in Japan for generations, Korean and Chinese in particular have a certain presence in research, but the dominance of Japanese is a matter of course. Not so with “Language and society” (Kotoba to shakai). Minority languages in Japan and elsewhere, migration and language, urbanisation and multilinguality, commodification of languages, 208
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language and identity, language in the internet age, Asia’s lingua francas, the Olympic games and language (2020 postponed by Covid-19) are characteristic topics of individual papers and special issues indicative of the journal’s stance. In its mission statement, Kiyoshi Hara, a driving force behind the creation of the journal, explains what it is meant to achieve. Within the framework of the modern nation state, there was a movement from dialects to standard languages, from multiple languages to a single language, and from varying languages to homogeneous languages. This seemed to be the way it should be, the natural course of things. There is now a movement in the opposite direction. In terms of language, the reconstruction and revitalization of dialects, minority languages, and the multitude of languages are becoming topical. Multiculturalism and multilingualism are the subject of discussion. [. . .] Our purpose is to explore the possibilities of a society in which the rights of language minorities are protected and a variety of multifaceted languages can coexist. [. . .] The birth of the modern nation state cannot but bring about monolingualization and homogenization? – We don’t think so. Rather, the Internet and multi-channel TV are proliferating multilingualism and linguistic diversity. At the same time, we must also be aware that there is a wide range of “endangered languages”. (Hara, 1999) Hara advocates a kind of sociolinguistics that takes notice of various changes occurring in Japan in conjunction with and under the heading of globalisation which were incompatible with an imagined monolingual Japan. And while emphasising rather than downplaying increasing migration and international contacts it should contribute to preserve and to promote linguistic diversity, support minorities, for instance, by making use of toponyms and proper names in their languages rather than the majority language, and respect minorities’ language rights. The new journal was intended and turned out to be a forum for discussing issues that seemed less relevant in the inwardlooking society of the post–World War II decades. If we compare Hara’s statement with the preceding quoted passage by Sibata, the difference in emphasis of the two sociolinguistic schools of thought are quite apparent. Hara and his colleagues not just acknowledge but embrace a multilingual Japanese society, while Sibata remained committed to a monolingual mindset. Calling the nature of the modern nation state into question is a tall order, and sociolinguistics is hardly the most pertinent field for controversies about it to be carried out; however, the journal Kotoba to shakai can well be viewed in the context of rethinking the nation state in the age of current global transformations. Against this background, some of the themes that have occupied Japanese sociolinguistics in recent years will be discussed in the remainder of this chapter.
Multilingualism With no more than 2.2% foreign nationals of the resident population, 2018, and only small autochthonous ethnic minorities with Japanese citizenship, Japan is more ethnically homogeneous than other industrial countries, but as of the 1990s, its domestic diversity and the impact of labour migration on the society could no longer be ignored (Maher & Yashiro, 1995; Coulmas & Heinrich, 2005; Chiavacci, 2016; Gottlieb, 2012). It has intensified ever since with implications for societal language arrangements that have become the subject of sociolinguistic research from 209
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various angles, notably with regard to education and the labour market. Children with limited or no Japanese language skills (Chitose, 2008; Kanno, 2008; Hirata & Kimura, 2017) posed a challenge for a school system predicated on linguistic homogeneity (Heinrich, 2012). In train with the formation of various immigrant communities arose the question of heritage language education. In addition to Chinese, Korean, and English, the use of Vietnamese, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Tagalog, and Indonesian has been observed in Hyōgo Prefecture alone (Shōji, 2017, p. 109f.), and in metropolitan Tokyo many more groups have invited work by both educators and researchers. Jointly with Shinji Sanada, Hiroshi Shōji has anticipated the coming of “Japan’s multilingual society” in the form of a dictionary (Sanada & Shōji, 2005 (in Japanese)) bringing together some 90 authors who tackle more than 160 relevant research topics. In the meantime, the research into Japan’s growing multitude of languages has found its expression in two voluminous international handbooks (Heinrich & Ohara, 2019; Asahi et al., 2022). The major minority groups, Chinese (Meng & Miyamoto, 2012) and Korean (Lee, 2020) residents, are by and large bilingual, but foreign students from these countries and more recent immigrants from Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries are not. It is from these countries that many immigrants come to Japan to fill labour market gaps, especially in the nursing care sector which in Japan’s super-ageing society keeps expanding (Backhaus, 2017), giving rise to a new field of research, intercultural care communication (e.g., Ogawa, 2018). In view of the shortage of care workers, the Japanese government introduced new visa categories and language proficiency tests for this sector (Milly, 2020). Ever since the seven-year occupation of Japan after World War II and because of its importance for international business communication, English is the most highly esteemed foreign language in Japan (Morita, 2010), although 150 years after the aforementioned proposal to adopt it as an official language proficiency remains low compared to many other countries (Margolis, 2020). This has given rise to many studies about language attitudes, group relations in Japan, and cultural factors impinging on language learning aptitude (e.g., Stapleton, 2010; McKenzie & Gilmore, 2015). As in other countries, more recognition of diversity in the face of Japan’s emergent multilingualism prompted scholarly and public discussions about integration of migrants, or newcomers, as they were called in contradistinction to indigenous minorities. Katsuragi (2003) explored the applicability of the ancient Buddhist concept of kyōsei, variously translated as “conviviality”, “co-existence”, or “symbiosis”, to the formation of a linguistically varied society, and the aforementioned journal Kotoba to Shakai made kyōsei the subject of a special issue (Hara, 2010). In as much as many municipalities were inspired by the concept to establish Kyōsei Centres or departments, with a multilingual staff to provide speakers with limited Japanese proficiency with some settlement support, the discourse around kyōsei proved politically stimulating. However, because kyōsei concentrates on newcomers and does not refer to the Ainu communities, Ryūkyūans, or the long-term resident ethnic Koreans and Chinese it also attracted criticism (Iizasa (2013); see also Kibe (2014)).
Return migration As discussions revolving around kyōsei had shown, it turned out to be difficult to imagine a society of cultural and linguistic multitude instead of focussing on the integration of individual groups without questioning the integrity of the majority society. A special case in this regard are Ethnic Japanese return migrants (Nikkeijin), the offspring of early twentieth-century Japanese emigrants to Latin America, especially Brazil. Although the Japanese communities in Brazil were strongly committed to their native language, the “whitening policy” and the nationalism that gripped 210
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Brazilian politics in the 1920s and 1930s implied that children could not be formally instructed in any language but Portuguese (Adachi, 2015; Neto and Euro, 2020). As a result, Japanese language proficiency quickly declined from one generation to the next, and many return-migrants who came to Japan in the 1990s had only limited and, in any event, marked Japanese language skills (Barfield, 2009). Based on Japan’s racially predicated immigration control policy the Nikkeijin enjoy preferential treatment. In contradistinction to other immigrants seeking employment in Japan, they are permitted entry for an indefinite period and granted the right to work without restraint. But they are not Japanese. Their Japanese lineage has been overlaid by Latin American culture (Carvalho, 2003), which came as a surprise to many in Japan. Their appearance at the workplace and in other social domains shattered the popular perception of unity of race and language (Tsuda, 2003) or what Lie (2001) called Japan’s “monoethnic myth”. Ota (2009) has studied the Japanese language taken to Brazil which absorbed Portuguese influence and became known as koroniago, “colonial language”, sometimes characterised as a creole language. When carried back to Japan, it deviated, not surprisingly, from standard Japanese, while influencing the formation of yet another variety, spoken by Portuguese-dominant speakers who integrated Japanese lexical items and grammatical structures as needed (Gibo, 2013; Dias, 2015). This variety’s name itself is composed of Japanese dekasegi “working away from home” and the Portuguese suffix -ês for language names, as in japonês and português. Another diaspora variety of Japanese has been investigated in dialect contact situations in Hawai’I (Asahi, 2021). Like the Nikkeijin in Brazil, the Japanese who immigrated to Hawai’i in the early twentieth century to work on plantations hailed from impoverished rural areas speaking rural dialects rather than standard Japanese. Since they came from different prefectures in Japan some of which were geographically far apart, when forming migrant communities, they built new contact varieties that have been analysed with the “second dialect acquisition” approach inspired by Chambers’ (1992) work on Canadian English speakers in England (Hiramoto & Asahi, 2013). The peculiarities of dialect contact in overseas settings opened up another field of studying the social aspects of the multifacetedness of Japanese.
Identity Concurrent with, though not exclusively triggered by, the influx of Japanese-Brazilians, identity arrived in Japan or rather the concept that had obsessed sociolinguists and other social scientists in Western countries since the 1960s (Coulmas, 2019). In the 1970s, aidentiti was adopted into Japanese as an English loanword, however, according to a NINJAL survey about loanwords acceptance, it did not take root quickly. By 2002 just about 10% of respondents had some idea what it meant. In Japanese sociolinguistics, identity became a research subject nevertheless, partly because new phenomena, such as the designation of mixed-race people as hāfu “halfs”, (Iwasaki, 2018) and the increased mobility of the young generation (Kurata, 2018) attracted scholarly attention, and partly because global trends and the desire to take part in the discussion of apparently important topics using apparently important terms are irresistible (Nakane et al., 2015). The journal Kotoba to shakai thus also published a special issue on the topic of language and identity (no. 18, 2016). Where the language-identity nexus is discussed, gender cannot, of course, be ignored. With a strong emphasis of linguistic etiquette and relatively clearly marked gender distinctions, the various normative and actual means of expressing femininity and masculinity in Japanese have often been scrutinised. Japanese women’s language has long been a national issue, the dangers of its corruption by way of assimilating too many male patterns a general concern (Inoue, 2002; Ide & 211
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Yoshida, 2017). Increased pressure on the labour market and other social trends have altered the position of women in society prompting research about how linguistic gender differentiation is affected by progressing social gender equality (Nakamura, 2014).
Language contact Since the Meiji period, which Japan’s foremost philosopher of the twentieth century, Maruyama Masao, has called a “translation culture” (Katō & Maruyama, 1988), the number of European loanwords, Dutch, English, German, French (Maher, 2022) had been on the rise. After World War II and seven years of US occupation this lexical influx exploded, the vast majority coming from English. So many loanwords and made-in-Japan pseudo-Anglicisms entered the Japanese language that they came to be studied not just in lexicography, but in sociolinguistics as well. Lexically, Japanese is a mixed language which does not lend itself easily to purist ideologisation. Depending on the texts studied, its vocabulary consists of 33% to 39% native Japanese lexemes and 40% to 49% Chinese (origin) lexemes, the rest being made up of around 8% each of nonChinese loans and mixed coinages (# 1645). During the second half of the twentieth century, the proportion of loanwords from European languages has increased sharply. The absolute number of Western words borrowed into Japanese is extremely high. Specialty dictionaries devoted to gairaigo [non-Chinese loanwords, F.C.] typically list 20,000–30,000 loanwords and can exceed 50,000. One dictionary with 52,500 loanwords, published in 2000, contained 45,000 loanwords written in katakana and 7,500 written in the original Roman alphabet [. . .]; the first edition of this dictionary, published in 1972, contained only 20,000 loanwords. (Daulton, 2008, p. 13) Excessive use of loanwords has occupied teachers and been discussed extensively in the media. The National Language Research Institute, NINJAL, put surveys on attitudes to loanwords on its agenda, studies correlating social change with lexical borrowing (Jinnouchi, 2007) and linguistic purism with political orientation (Hosokawa, 2015) were carried out, and popular books about the topic appeared. For instance, Minae Mizumura’s (2008) When Japanese Perishes, in the Century of English became a bestseller. The concern extended to serious scholarship, for instance when renowned sociolinguist Fumio Inoue (2001) in the title of a book raised the question of whether “Japanese can survive”. He addressed this question from “the point of view of the economics of language” and thereby helped to establish a new sub-field within Japanese sociolinguistics. Inoue portrays Japanese as an isolated language not well-positioned in a rapidly globalising world in which Japan is heavily engaged economically, while her language has little international appeal. Topics he focusses on include the elaborate system of honorific language, the complex writing system, the relative difficulty of Japanese as a foreign language, the intense influx of loanwords, as well as the issue of an additional official language for Japan. Against this background he raises the question – although he does not answer it – of language difficulty and its economic implications, e.g., the cost of becoming proficient in Japanese in terms of time and money as compared to other languages. Given that a learner’s L1 is an important factor of the relative difficulty of any L2, nothing definitive can be said about the difficulty of Japanese as a foreign language in the absence of empirical data. Yet, Inoue’s question has interesting implications for the spread of both Japanese and English. In his view, the aforementioned features of Japanese are undermining its competitiveness in the global market place of languages which is dominated by English and, albeit far behind, a few other European languages. 212
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Language on the move Concerns about its demise notwithstanding, Japanese hasn’t died yet, and with a speech community of more than 120 million is not likely to disappear any time soon. What is more, in spite of its presumed difficulty Japanese has gained additional speakers, at home and abroad, and in the process, it keeps changing, as languages do. The factors driving the changes – migration, online communication, international business relations, demographic ageing – differ from those of earlier, less fast-moving times. The study of language and society in Japan now comprises a greater variety of socially relevant topics, in Japan and abroad than it ever did. Mobility, in a geographic, social, and virtual sense, sticks out as a feature that characterises Japanese society at present more than in former times, and reflecting that, the Japanese language as well as the language arrangements of Japanese society are widely perceived to be in flux. Whether the depth and velocity of the ongoing changes are more profound than in the past is an empirical question to which a great deal of research is devoted. The linguistic aspects of international marriages, language education of expat families’ children, returnees, participants of study abroad programmes and the language life of Japanese living overseas invite a change of perspective. The conceptualisation of language as a clearly demarcated stable entity reclines into the background while its dynamic processual properties that allow its speakers to adjust it to shifting circumstances come to the fore. Consequently, “language on the move” has become a research topic that is scrutinised in various contexts, notably but not only in metropolitan environments (e.g., Shibuya & Jian, 2013; Kawakami, Miyake, Iwasaki, 2018; Fukuda, 2017; Miyake & Arai, 2021). Although at a level above 90% Japan’s urbanisation rate is very high, the process continues, with repercussions for language mobility as new urban dialects emerge (Inoue & Yarimizu, 2002) and new newcomer communities establish themselves (LiuFarrer, 2020). Yet another aspect of Japanese on the move is to do with its employment by L2 speakers amongst themselves, that is, as a lingua franca. Labour migrants from different countries and linguistic backgrounds with no other shared language, notably English, working in the gastronomy sector as well as in construction speak Japanese with each other. Although the new pidgins and learner varieties that are being created in these environments are only beginning to be explored (Aoyama, 2020) they can be viewed as symbolic references to the areas into which Japanese sociolinguistics is expanding.
Conclusions This brief overview should have made it clear that sociolinguistics in Japan is a vibrant field of research involving Japanese and several other languages spoken in Japan and/or with which speakers of Japanese are in contact in Japan and elsewhere. Currently investigated topics and applied methods betray a certain influence of research in English-speaking countries; however, the language arrangements and social environments that are the subjects and settings of research are distinctly Japanese. In the course of recent decades, Japanese sociolinguists have paid more attention to international and transnational dynamics affecting the Japanese language domestically and overseas. This reorientation of scholarly interest from the national language and the “language life” of its speakers to a broader canvas of evolving multilingualism, linguistic diasporas and various language contact phenomena reflects socio-economic dynamics that have greatly strengthened Japan’s international connectedness and the appearance of transnational communities at home. 213
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Increased tolerance for variation, as evidenced by the revival of dialects or dialect nostalgia, as I would call it, the recognition of minority languages, and a measure of attention for endangered languages, can be understood as a result of the transition from industrial society to post-industrial society. Industrialisation favoured standards and homogeneity (Doerr, 2015), a national state and a national language that unites the entire population and marginalises speakers of other languages. In contrast, the post-industrial age, in Japan as in many advanced countries, is more accepting of diversity, favours inclusion and integration, to use current catchwords. Not that ethnocentrism or the idea of Japanese uniqueness have disappeared from Japan, but intellectual horizons have broadened over the past few decades, and Japanese sociolinguistics has contributed to that.
References 1645. Gendai nihongo no katarigusa bunpu [Distribution of Modern Japanese Vocabulary]. National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL). http://user.keio.ac.jp/~rhotta/hellog/2013-10-28-1.html Adachi, N. (2015). “But it’s our mother tongue!”: The Japanese language as spoken in a Japanese Brazilian community. Japanese Language and Literature, 49, 453–483. Aoyama, R. (2020). ‘Ringafuranka toshite no nihongo’ no kako to mirai [Past and future of ‘Japanese as lingua franca’]. In A. Reijirō, A. Tomoko, & L. Sosei (Eds.), Ringafuranka toshite no nihongo [Japanese as a lingua franca] (pp. 171–194). Akashi Shoten. Asahi, Y. (2021). Hawai no nikkei imin-shi ni okeru nihongo no yakuwari [The role of Japanese in the history of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii]. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies International Japanese Studies Departmental Bulletin, 11, 29–41. Asahi, Y., Usami, M., & Inoue, F. (2022). Handbook of Japanese sociolinguistics. Mouton DeGruyter. Backhaus, P. (2017). Care communication. Making a home in a Japanese eldercare facility. Routledge. Barfield, A. (2009). Brazilian Nikkeijin migration: Language issues. http://c-faculty.chuo-u.ac.jp/~andyb/ GM/BRNM/BRNMLanguage.html Carvalho, D. de. (2003). Migrants and identity in Japan and Brazil. RoutledgeCurzon. Chambers, J. K. (1992). Dialect acquisition. Language, 68, 673–705. Chiavacci, D. (2016). Migration and integration patterns of new immigrants in Japan: Diverse structures of inequality. In D. Chiavacci & C. Hommerich (Eds.), Social inequality in post-growth Japan: Transformation during economic and demographic stagnation (pp. 233–249). Routledge. Chitose, Y. (2008). Compulsory schooling of immigrant children in Japan: A comparison across children’s nationalities. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 17(2), 157–187. Coulmas, F. (2019). Identity. A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Coulmas, F., & Heinrich, P. (Eds.). (2005). Changing language regimes in globalizing environments: Japan and Europe. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 175/176. Daulton, F. E. (2008). Japan’s built-in lexicon of English-based loanwords. Multilingual Matters. Dias, N. (2015). Dekasseguês: Um português diferente? Variações linguísticas e interculturalidade nas migrações contemporâneas dentro do sistema-mundo modern. Horizontes Decoloniales/Decolonial Horizons, 1, 62–101. Doerr, N. M. (2015). Standardization and paradoxical highlighting of linguistic diversity in Japan. Japanese Language and Literature, 49, 389–403. Fukuda, M. (2017). Kaigai zaijū nihonjin no gengo seikatsu [The language life of Japanese living overseas]. In F. Hirata & G. C. Kimura (Eds.), Tagengoshugi shakaini mukete [Towards a Multilingual Society] (pp. 143–157). Kurosio. Gibo, L. E. (2013). Gengo sesshoku-ron kara mita Burajiru Okinawa koronia-go [Brazil-Okinawa colonial language from the point of view of language contact theory]. Immigration Studies, 9, 19–40. http://ir.lib.uryukyu.ac.jp/bitstream/20.500.12000/29154/1/No9p019.pdf Gottlieb, N. (2012). Language policy in Japan. The challenges of change. Cambridge University Press. Hara, K. (1999). “Kotoba to shakai” ha nani wo mezasuka [What “Kotoba to shakai” is aiming for]. Kotoba to Shakai, 1, preface without page number. Hara, K. (Ed.). (2010). Gengoteki tayōsei toiu siza [Perspectives of linguistic diversity]. Kotoba to Shakai, special isse no. 3. Sangensha.
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Sociolinguistics in Japan Heinrich, P. (2002). Gengo seikatsu. The study of language life in Japan. Historiographia Linguistica, XXIX, 95–119. Heinrich, P. (2012). The making of monolingual Japan. Multilingual Matters. Heinrich, P., & Ohara, Y. (Eds.). (2019). Routledge handbook of Japanese sociolinguistics. Routledge. Hiramoto, M., & Asahi, Y. (2013). Pronoun usage of Japanese plantation immigrants in Hawai‘i. NINJAL Research Papers, 6, 19–28. Hirata, F., & Christoph, K. G. (Eds.). (2017). Tagengoshugi shakaini mukete [Towards a multilingual society]. Kurosio. Hosokawa, N. (2015). Nationalism and linguistic purism in contemporary Japan: National sentiment expressed through public attitudes towards foreignisms. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 15, 48–65. Ide, S., & Yoshida, M. (2017). Sociolinguistics: Honorifics and gender differences. In N. Tsujimura (Ed.), The handbook of Japanese linguistics (pp. 444–480). Blackwell. Iizasa, S. (2013). ‘Tabunka kyōsei’ toiu bunan na anzenchitai’ [A safe zone of multicultural coexistence]. In T. Iyotani (Ed.), Idou toiu keiken (pp. 185–209). Yushindo. Inoue, F. (1998). Nihongo uochingu [Japanese Language Watching]. Iwanami shoten. Inoue, F. (2001). Nihongo ha ikinokoreruka. Keizaigengogaku no shiten kara [Can Japanese survive? The point of view of the economics of language]. PHP Shinsho. Inoue, F., & Yarimizu, K. (2002). Jiten. Atarashii nihongo [Dictionary of New Japanese]. Toyo Shorin. Inoue, M. (2002). Gender, language, and modernity: Toward an effective history of Japanese women’s language. American Ethnologist, 29, 392–422. Iwasaki, N. (2018). ‘Hāfu’ no gakusei no nihon ryūgaku [‘Half’ students studying in Japan]. In K. Ikuo, K. Miyake, & N. Iwasaki (Eds.), Idō to kotoba [Mobility and Language] (pp. 16–38). Kurosio. Jinnouchi, M. (2007). Gairai-go no shakai gengo-gaku – nihongo no gurōkaruna kangaekata [The sociolinguistics of loanwords – The glocal thinking of Japanese]. Sekaishisosha. Kanno, Y. (2008). Language and education in Japan. Unequal access to bilingualism. Palgrave MacMillan. Katō, S., & Masao, M. (1988). Honyaku no shisō [‘Translation thought’]. Iwanami Shoten. Katsuragi, T. (2003). Kotoba to kyōsei [Language and conviviality]. Sangensha. Kawakami, I., Kazuko, M., & Noriko, I. (Eds.). (2018). Idō to kotoba [Mobility and language]. Kurosio. Kawasumi, T. (Ed.). (1978). Eigo kyoiku ronso shi [A history of controversies on English teaching]. Taishukan. Kibe, T. (2014). Can tabunkakyosei be a public philosophy of integration? Immigration, citizenship and multiculturalism in Japan. In W. Vosse, R. Drifte, & V. Blechinger-Talcott (Eds.), Governing insecurity in Japan: The domestic discourse and policy response (pp. 71–91). Routledge. Kunihiro, T., Inoue, F., & Long, D. (Eds.). (1999). Takesi Sibata. Sociolinguistics in Japanese contexts. Mouton de Gruyter. Kurata, N. (2018). Idōsuru shōnen no kotoba to aidentiti. In K. Ikuo, M. Kazuko, & I. Noriko (Eds.), Idō to kotoba [Mobility and language] (pp. 39–62). Kurosio. Lee, J. H. (2020). Language use among Japanese-Korean bilinguals with age as a determining factor: Students at Chosengakko, Korean School in Japan. Asian and African Linguistics, 14, 45–58. Lie, J. (2001). Multiethnic Japan. Harvard University Press. Liu-Farrer, G. (2020). Immigrant Japan: Mobility and belonging in an ethno-nationalist society. Cornell University Press. Maher, J. (Ed.). (2022). Languages of Japan. Oxford University Press. Maher, J., & Yashiro, K. (Eds.). (1995). Multilingual Japan. Multilingual Matters. Margolis, E. (2020). Japan doesn’t want to become another casualty of English. Foreign Affairs. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/26/japan-doesnt-want-to-become-another-casualty-of-english/ McKenzie, R. M., & Gilmore, A. (2015). “The people who are out of ‘right’ English”: Japanese university students’ social evaluations of English language diversity and the internationalisation of Japanese higher education. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 27, 152–175. Meng, H., & Miyamoto, T. (2012). Input and output in codeswitching: A case study of a Japanese bilingual infant. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 15, 393–415. http://doi.org/10.10 80/13670050.2012.665826 Milly, D. J. (2020). Japan’s labor migration reforms: Breaking with the past? Migration Information Source. www.migrationpolicy.org/article/japan-labor-migration-reforms-breaking-past Miyake, K., & Arai, Y. (Eds.). (2021). Mobiriti to kotoba wo meguru chosen: Shakai gengo-gaku no aratana ‘idō’ [Challenges of mobility and language: A new ‘movement’ in sociolinguistics]. Kurosio.
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Florian Coulmas Mizumura, M. (2008). Nihongo ga horobiru toki: Eigo no seiki no naka de [When Japanese perishes, in the century of English]. Chikuma Shobō. Morita, L. (2010). The sociolinguistic context of English language education in Japan and Singapore. Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies. www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/2010/ Morita.html Nagano, M. (1957). Bamen to kotoba [language in situ]. In Etsutarō Iwabuchi et al. (Eds.), Kōza gendai kokugogaku [A course of contemporary studies of the national language] (Vol. I, pp. 123–148). Chikuma Shobō. Nakamura, M. (2014). Gender, language and ideology. A genealogy of Japanese women’s language. John Benjamins. Nakane, I., Otsuji, E., & Armour, W. S. (Eds.). (2015). Languages and identities in a transitional Japan from internationalization to globalization. Routledge. Neto, C., & Euro, M. (2020). Koroniago: Manifestação etno-linguístico cultural de uma Coiné “nipobrasileira”. https://app.uff.br/riuff/handle/1/14610 Ogawa, M. (2018). Kaigo genba ni okeru komyunikēshon to ha. EPA ni yoru indoneshiajin kōhosha ukeire shisetsu kara [Communications at the caring site in Japan. Lessons from a facility hosting Indonesian candidates through EPA]. Literacies, 22, 1–17. Ota, J. (2009). A língua falada nas comunidades rurais nipo-brasileirasdo estado de São Paulo – considerações sobre koronia-go. Synergies Brésil, 7, 49–56. Sanada, S., & Shōji, H. (Eds.). (2005). Jiten Nihon no tagengoshakai [Dictionary Japanese multilingual society]. Iwanami. Shibuya, K., & Jian, Y. (2013). Tabisuru Nihongo: Igengo to no deai ga kaeta mono. [Travelling Japanese: What contact with other languages changed]. Iwanami Shoten. Shōji, H. (2017). Imin no bogo kyōiku no genjō to kadai [Current situation and challenges of mother tonge education for immigrants]. In F. Hirata & G. C. Kimura (Eds.), Tagengoshugi shakaini mukete [Towards a multilingual society] (pp. 104–116). Kurosio. Sibata, T. (1985). Sociolinguistic surveys in Japan: Approaches and problems. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 55, 79–88. Stapleton, P. (2010). Culture’s role in TEFL: An attitude survey in Japan. Language Culture and Curriculum, 1, 291–305. http://doi.org/10.1080/07908310008666605 Tsuda, T. (2003). Strangers in the ethnic homeland: Japanese Brazilian return migration in transnational perspective. Columbia University Press. Twine, N. (1991). Language and the modern state. The reform of written Japanese. Routledge. Yoneda, M. (1997). Survey of standardisation in Tsuruoka, Japan. Japanese Linguistics, 2, 24–39. http://doi. org/10.15084/00001976
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17 KOREA Recent trends in sociolinguistic research Hyeon-Seok Kang
Introduction South Korea is a monolingual country where only one language, i.e., Korean, is spoken as an official language, and 96% of its people living on its land are ethnic Koreans. There are virtually no languages spoken or used by a significant number of minority ethnic groups in the country. English, Chinese, and Japanese are the three major languages taught at primary and secondary schools as a foreign language, and English currently exerts some important social and linguistic influence in the nation. North Korea, which shares the border with South Korea on the Korean Peninsula, is another Korean-speaking monolingual nation. South Korea had a population of about 52 million (27th in the world) and the world’s 10th largest total GDP in 2021. Although South Korea is a monolingual nation, it still presents many sociolinguistic issues and themes for research, and quite a few studies have been conducted in various subfields of sociolinguistics. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce and discuss the recent trends of sociolinguistic research in South Korea (Korea, henceforth). The focus of the discussion will be the research conducted during the 2010s in the nation. Sociolinguistics of North Korea is not known well outside the nation and is beyond the scope of this study. This chapter will first discuss the history of Korean sociolinguistics briefly, in order to put Korea’s recent sociolinguistic research in proper perspective.
A brief historical sketch of Korean sociolinguistics Previous work (Shinn, 1990; Wang, 2008; H.-S. Kang, 2021) suggests that in Korea, sociolinguistic research in its modern sense began in the 1970s. However, linguistic studies, which show some sociolinguistic perspectives and analyses, are already observed from the 1930s. The main research themes of such work before the 1970s are argots/slang, honorifics/address terms, kinship terms, standard/regional dialects, taboo words/euphemisms, women’s language, etc. It can be said that word-level sociolinguistics constitutes the bulk of the research during the 1930s to 1960s period. Wang (2008) suggested that the sociolinguistic research of Korea in the 1970s and 1980s was conducted by researchers in the fields of Korean linguistics, English linguistics, linguistics, and anthropology, and that the most popular research theme in these two decades was honorifics/address terms. According to Shinn (1990), another predominant research area in this period was language 217
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-20
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policy (examining such topics as language purification, Romanization of Korean words, etc.). She also observed that studies of language and gender, dialectology, language variation, bilingualism, language attitude, discourse, and mass media language were conducted in this period as well. The Sociolinguistic Society of Korea (SSK) was formed in 1990 by scholars with various research backgrounds and became a foundation for further advancement of sociolinguistics in Korea, offering chances for its members to present their work at its regular conferences and publish their articles in the society’s academic journal, Sahoeeoneohak/the Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea. Those researchers who were academically trained in sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology in foreign countries also helped the development of sociolinguistics in Korea by introducing new sociolinguistic theories and research methods. H.Y. Kim (2010) examined the trends of sociolinguistic studies of Korea by analyzing the research themes of the articles published in the journal of SSK in the 1990s and 2000s. According to the result of his analyses, the subfields of sociolinguistics, where considerable research was done in this period, were discourse/conversation analysis (18%), honorifics/address terms (11%), sociolinguistic studies of education (8%), language attitude (6%), language policy (6%), language and gender (5%), linguistic anthropology/culture (5%). Discourse analysis, which was a newly emerging research area in the 1970s and 1980s, was analyzed as the most researched subfield of sociolinguistics in Korea, along with the traditionally popular topic of honorifics/address terms. H.Y. Kim (2010) also states that sociolinguistic studies of education became active in this period as the communicative approach to language teaching became dominant and thus more interest in communicative competence grew in the education field. An analytic approach similar to H.Y. Kim’s (2010) is taken by the present study. On the premise that the articles published in SSK’s journal during the 2010s (2011~2020, to be exact) reflect the recent research trends of the nation’s sociolinguistics, the research areas of those articles were examined, and the results are summarized in Table 17.1. The total number of the articles was 296, Table 17.1 Research areas of the articles published in the Journal of the Sociolinguistic Society of Korea during the 2011~2020 period Research areas
No. of articles
Discourse/conversation analysis Sociolinguistic studies of education Language variation/dialectology Newspaper/broadcast language honorifics/address terms Linguistic anthropology/culture Electronic language Language policy Language attitude Language contact/multilingualism Advertisement language North Korean and Chinese Korean dialects Intercultural communication Language and gender Others Sum
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Percentage
65 36 25 24 23 22 20 17 13 13 11 10
18% 10% 7% 7% 6% 6% 6% 5% 4% 4% 3% 3%
9 9 58 355(296)
3% 3% 16% 100%
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but those articles, whose research themes are closely linked to two sociolinguistic subfields, were counted for both research areas, producing the sum of 355 (see the last row of the table). The table shows that discourse/conversation analytic research and sociolinguistic studies of language education are still among the most studied areas in Korean sociolinguistics as in the 1990s and 2000s. Especially the percentage of the latter rose as the number of studies on the teaching and learning of Korean as a foreign language (KFL) sharply increased; this is deemed due to foreigners’ rising interest in the learning of Korean as the economic and cultural status of Korea is elevated. Besides sociolinguistic studies of language education, those subfields of sociolinguistics which have recently gained more research attention are electronic language and language variation. The rise in the number of research on electronic language reflects Koreans’ more regular and common use of electronic language after the introduction of smart phones in the early 2000s. An increasing number of variation studies is also observed to be conducted by younger researchers with more refined analytic and statistical methods. The recent research trends of major areas of Korean sociolinguistics will be discussed in the following sections.
Discourse analysis Among different research approaches to discourse analysis, which include interactional linguistics, ethnography of speaking, variation theory, critical discourse analysis (CDA), and conversational analysis (CA), the last two approaches are most commonly found among discourse studies in Korea. H.Y. Kim (2020) suggests that relatively many CDA studies are conducted in Korea, because data from the news media, which are the main object of CDA research, are fairly easy to obtain and offer various topics of investigation including politics, economy, society, and culture. Some CDA studies analyze the articles of newspapers of more than one country using an electronic corpus-based approach. For instance, Bang and Shin (2010) found that human rights-related expressions and capitalism-related terms occurred most frequently with democracy and minju (a Korean word for English democracy) in U.S. and South Korean newspapers, respectively, and interpreted the result as possibly coming from the two nations’ different stages of democratization and economic maturity. M.H. Kim (2012) examined different perspectives found in Korean, Japanese, and U.S. English newspapers’ coverage of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, and showed, especially, that in terms of ‘ideological square’ (i.e., twin strategies of positive ‘ingroup’ description and negative ‘outgroup’ depiction (van Dijk, 1998)), the three nations’ newspapers kept very different stances. Similar differences in stance found in M.H. Kim (2012) are also reported by Seo (2021) between the headlines of Korean and Chinese newspaper articles reporting on the U.S. Army’s THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) deployment in Korea. Research in conversation analysis (CA) in Korea began in the 1990s with U.S.-trained linguists’ CA studies examining ‘grammatical practices’, i.e., those analyzing Korean topic markers, discourse connectives, modal markers, etc. A recent study of this type is K.H. Kim (2021), which examined Korean speakers’ use of topic marker -nun in conversation. The research scope of CA in Korea broadened with studies analyzing ‘interactional practices’ (i.e., those examining the structural systematicity of conversation such as turn-taking, sequence organization, or repair organization) and widened further with research on ‘institutional talk’ like doctor-patient interaction (e.g., Y.J. Park, 2017), client-service representative talk (e.g., S.H. Lee, 2011), or classroom discourse (Y.A. Lee, 2006). Since the latter half of the 2000s, more research has been conducted as to ‘interactional practices’ than ‘grammatical practices’ (Kim & Suh, 2020), and CA studies of multi-modal analysis (e.g., J.E. Park, 2007), which analyze both audio- and video-recorded data, are also conducted, though they are still a minority. 219
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Language variation Studies of language variation and change (LVC) in its modern sense began at the end of the 1980s in Korea. LVC studies have been conducted on various linguistic levels: phonological level, morpho-syntactic level, and lexical level. Studies of phonological variables can be divided into those of vowel variability, which also subsumes variation in intonation, and consonant variation. Studies of vowel variation include research on /o/ raising (e.g., H.S. Kang, 2014), and the monophthongization of /ɨi/ and /wi/ (or /ui/) (e.g., Bae, 2012). Kwon (2018) is notable in that it analyzed the vowel pronunciations of Noam Chomsky, who is originally from Philadelphia but had lived in Boston for more than 30 years. She found that Chomsky’s vowels are close to those of the Boston dialect but not identical, and interprets the results as implying that adults can learn a second dialect but may not attain it perfectly. Recent research on consonant variation includes those examining the tensification of word-initial obstruents in the Daegu dialect (Bae & Lee, 2010) and the variable pronunciation of word-initial /l/ and /n/ in munhwaeo/Standard North Korean (Jung & Shin, 2017), which allows the word-initial production of the two sonorants unlike South Korean dialects. Recent studies of morphosyntactic variation in Korean were mainly those examining the variability of sentential endings of verbs and adjectives, especially the alternation of haeyo and hapsyo honorific styles (Kang & Kim, 2018), and that of -ni and -nya, two interrogative sentential endings of the haera style (Cho, 2017). Cho (2018) and J.-S. Lee (2018) are, on the other hand, recent notable research investigating lexical variation. Cho (2018) examined the variability involving the use of various address forms (gyosu(nim) ‘professor’, seonsaeng(nim) ‘teacher’, baksa(nim) ‘doctor’, and saem ‘(abbreviated) teacher’) by college professors to call their colleagues, and J.-S. Lee (2018) investigated Korean speakers’ variable use of aeplikeisyeon, eopeulikeisyeon, ayp, and eopeul to refer to an application/ap of English.
Language and the media Modern media include various types: print media, broadcast media, the internet, advertisements, movies, video games, etc. The discussion in this section will focus on the language of the following three: print media, broadcast media, and the internet. Among the three, sociolinguistic research on electronic/internet language is currently most active in Korea (D.G. Park, 2020), even though the internet media has the shortest history. Most studies on print media were conducted on the language of newspapers; some analyzed the headlines of articles (e.g., Seo, 2015) and some analyzed article texts, especially editorials (e.g., B.K. Kim, 2016). Most studies have been discourse analytic research. Research on broadcast language mostly investigated TV language, and the language of TV news has been a frequent topic of research. For instance, Suh (2014), within the framework of conversation analysis, analyzed a famous news anchor’s interview with three well-known Korean politicians, focusing on how the anchor designed his questions to maintain a balance between two competing journalistic norms: neutrality and adversarialness. The topics of research on electronic language include language used in chatting (J.B. Lee, 2002a), emails (J.B. Lee, 2002b), SNS (Nam, 2015), instant messengers (Kang & Kim, 2018), and readers’ comments on internet news (Shim, 2019), etc.; the scope of research topics is becoming broader with the appearance of new electronic devices and the diversification of online platforms. Some notable studies on electronic language include J.S. Lee (2013), which examined the differences between Korean and English in features of electronic language, and D.G. Park (2012), which analyzed a group of lexical items ending in -nam ‘man’ and -nyeo ‘woman’ (that were widely used in the 2000s online) and attempted an explanation of their prevalent use in that period. 220
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Honorifics and address terms Korean is, along with Japanese and Javanese, well known for its complex system of honorifics use. The honorifics of Korean consists mainly of honorific grammatical elements, such as sentence endings and case particles, and honorific lexical expressions of some nouns, verbs, and pronouns. Most of the linguistic studies on the honorifics system of Korean focused on morpho-syntactic research before its sociolinguistic investigation began in the 1970s. Since this period, sociolinguistic analyses have been made on the honorifics system, its elements, and the factors influencing honorifics use on the basis of daily conversation, broadcast language, script texts of TV dramas and films, etc. The scope of study has been enlarged recently to include research examining honorifics used in reviews of journal articles (J.B. Lee, 2012), dialogues in mask dances (Jang, 2013), and electronic language (e.g., J.B. Lee, 2017). Comparative studies of the honorifics of Korean and Japanese (e.g., Hong, 2011) and research on foreigners’ acquisition of the Korean honorifics system (e.g., Yang & Kim, 2013) are also observed. Korean is also one of the languages that have a complex system of address terms. The types of commonly used Korean address terms are various, and they include personal names, kinship terms, job or position titles, teknonyms, geononyms, etc. The use of Korean address terms and honorifics is usually interrelated, and the former is examined and discussed in conjunction with honorifics in many sociolinguistic analyses. The topics of recent studies of Korean address terms include terms of address between husband and wife (e.g., Ku, 2016), among college professors (e.g., Cho, 2018), and among SNS users (Ahn & Yang, 2018). A comparative study of Korean and Japanese and Korean and Russian in address terms was also conducted by Hong (2018) and Han (2016), respectively.
Linguistic anthropology Research in linguistic anthropology started in the 1980s in Korea. In the earlier period of the field, positivist studies in the subfields of ethnoscience (e.g., studies of kinship and ethnobiological terms) and ethnography of communication were the majority. From the 2000s, however, research, incorporating the concept of language ideology and identity to the analysis of linguistic data, began to appear. Since the 2010s, studies on verbal art (such as word play (e.g., J.K. Kim, 2011) and jokes (e.g., Im, 2016)), and globalization/transnationalism (e.g., Y.H. Kang, 2012) have also been conducted, as have semiotic anthropological studies (e.g., J.H. Park, 2016). Wang’s (e.g., 2016, 2021) series of linguistic ethnographical monographs are also notable, since they provide valuable records of the language and culture of many provincial areas of Korea. Language socialization has been another popular topic of linguistic anthropology research. Ahn (2016) is one such example, which examined the various aspects of language socialization practice of Korean children on the basis of observation of linguistic and social activities of pre-kindergarten kids in Seoul. Y.H. Kang (2020) observes that the research data of linguistic anthropology of Korea has been extended from the traditional data collected by field work to linguistic data of mass media (e.g., broadcast, internet, newspaper), jokes, word play, internet posts, and words of popular songs.
Language policy/planning Language planning can be divided into planning of language status, language corpus, and language education. According to Cho (2020), the percentage of past studies in Korea of language planning in each sub-area is corpus planning (38%), education planning (29%), and status planning (17%). 221
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He also reports that the percentages of past language planning studies by country/region are Korea (65%), Europe (13%), Asia (9%), and North Korea (7%). Among research in corpus planning, studies on Korean orthography (e.g., Sin, 2019), Romanization of Korean words (e.g., S.C. Kim, 2012), and Hangeul (Korean alphabet) writing of foreign words (e.g., H.Y. Lee, 2017) are common. Main areas of studies in education planning are domestic Korean education (e.g., J.Y. Park, 2011), overseas Korean education (e.g., J.H. Lee et al., 2018), and English education (e.g., K.K. Lee, 2018). Research in status planning has concentrated on the Education Ministry’s policies on Standard/nonstandard Korean (e.g., Sin, 2014) and the officialization of English in Korea and at some specific colleges and institutions (e.g., Kim & Choi, 2014).
Sociolinguistic studies of education Three major areas of sociolinguistic studies in language education of Korea are domestic Korean education, overseas Korean education, and English education. Korean is taught as a national/ official language (KNL) to Korean people, and as a second language (KSL) to immigrants, foreign workers/students, and foreign residents. Some foreigners overseas learn Korean as a foreign language (KFL), and many ethnic Koreans abroad learn it as a heritage language (KHL). Generally, there is more sociolinguistic research on the varieties of KSL, KFL, and KHL than on KNL, because more complex social and socio-psychological factors are involved in the teaching and learning of the former varieties due to language and cultural contact associated with them. Sociolinguistic research on KNL education include studies on linguistic variation and discourse. Sin (2015), for instance, analyzes the linguistic characteristics and features of adolescents’ electronic language and proposes how some of them can be incorporated into the contents of Korean grammar education; H.J. Kim (2012) discusses Grice’s conversational maxims and implicature and their implications in Korean language education. Sociolinguistic studies of KFL include E.H. Kim’s (2014) conversation analysis, which examined the use of Korean sentence ending -ketun by American learners of Korean. One sociolinguistic study on KSL education is Kong et al. (2013), which makes several proposals to improve the system of Korean language education for foreign migrant workers, including the one on the location of educational facilities. Among the sociolinguistic work on foreign language education in Korea, research related to English education is the absolute majority. Such recent studies include an analysis of discourse patterns/types of EFL classroom interaction (E.J. Kim, 2013), cross-cultural comparison of leaners’ perception of oral participation and silence in the classroom (Ha, 2010), and the current English education policy in North Korea (H.-S. Kang, 2020).
Conclusion This chapter outlined the research trends of recent sociolinguistic studies in Korea, focusing on the nation’s seven major areas of sociolinguistics (cf. Table 17.1). Those areas of sociolinguistic investigation which this chapter could not discuss because of limited space include language attitude, language contact, and language and gender, topics where not a few studies have been conducted as well. Studies in World Englishes and the more recent study of linguistic landscapes are also currently attracting Korean researchers’ attention and more research in these areas are expected in the future. At the time of writing, a full-length study of Korean English (Baratta, 2022) has just appeared, published in London by Bloomsbury. This work may serve as a benchmark of ‘Outer Circle’ English studies in Korea. Studies on the linguistic divergence of South and North Korean dialects and research on measures to prevent their further divergence (e.g., K.K. Lee, 222
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2016) are also observed. It is expected that the sociolinguistics of Korea will face new issues and tasks, as the nation becomes more multi-cultural with the influx of immigrants and foreign workers, and as the society gets more equal and egalitarian with the continuous rise of women’s rights and the status of its traditional minority groups.
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18 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIA David Bradley
Introduction This chapter discusses five countries: Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. They share Buddhist religion and other cultural influences from adjacent South Asia, or in Vietnam from China. Mahayana Buddhism came into Vietnam from China; Theravada Buddhism and its liturgical language Pali came into the others from South Asia. Their recent political history is diverse; Burma was an independent kingdom which was gradually conquered by the British in three wars between 1824 and 1886. Indochina was colonised by France as five separate colonies: Cochin China (southern Vietnam) and Cambodia in 1864, Annam (central Vietnam) in 1874, Tonkin (northern Vietnam) in 1885 and Laos in 1893. Indigenous kings also retained substantial status and power in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam; this ended in 1974 in Laos and in 1975 in Cambodia and Vietnam. Thailand has remained an independent monarchy, however the French took parts of Thailand: Laos in 1893 and what is now western Cambodia in 1907. All were occupied by Japan from 1942 to 1945; Burma achieved independence in 1948, the three Indochina countries during the 1950s. For a brief overview of the five national languages and some sociolinguistic background, see Bradley et al. (1998). For language maps and information on majority and minority languages and their genetic relationships, see Bradley (forthcoming). The same language and ethnic group may have different names, and these names may change. For example, the Hmong language is also called Myaing in Burma, Maew in Thailand and Laos, and Meo in Vietnam, or recently also Mong or Mông. In China, Hmong is part of the wider Miáo national minority. There has been extensive research on various areas of the sociolinguistics of these five countries in recent years, in particular on multilingualism, language contact, language policy and planning, and language and culture. One particular area of strength is investigation of second-language English learning. Another is the documentation and revitalisation of the many endangered minority languages of the area, particularly in Thailand; this is less of an issue in Burma, where most minority languages are not endangered. A feature of all five national languages is a rich variety of speech registers, for example complex socially stratified pronoun and other systems; this extends to full diglossia in Burmese. Use of formal registers was greatly reduced in Laos and especially in Cambodia from 1975. Many sociolinguistic variables in the national languages have been identified and are briefly discussed here. 227
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The ethnic Chinese who came by sea in the 19th and early 20th centuries and came to dominate the urban economic scene, particularly in Thailand but also in Burma up to 1960 and Laos, Cambodia and parts of Vietnam up to 1975, were speakers of a variety of non-Mandarin varieties, mainly Min and Cantonese with some Hakka and others. In recent years, many ethnic Chinese who speak Mandarin varieties have moved into all these countries except Vietnam to seek economic opportunities; there are old Chinese enclaves in every urban area and major Chinese infrastructure developments such as roads, ports and railroads. Traditional Chinese characters and non-Mandarin spoken varieties are being replaced by simplified Chinese characters and spoken Mandarin, even among descendants of earlier waves of migration.
Burma Burmese or Myanmar is the national and official language, recognised as such in the constitutions of 1947, 1974 and 2008; since AD 1111, it is written in an Indic script adapted from Mon. It is a Tibeto-Burman language, as are most of the minority languages of Burma. In 1989 the military government changed the English name of the country and its language to Myanmar, which is the name in literary High Burmese, and now use the spoken Low Burmese term Bamar to refer to the majority ethnic group with Burmese as their mother tongue. The English term Burma is derived from the spoken Low form of this word; this was the English name of the country up to 1989 and is still preferred outside military circles. Allott (1985), Bradley (2016a) and McCormick (2019) give an overview of language policy in Burma. The Burma Language Commission, since 1990 officially known as the Myanmar Language Commission, is the language policy body and makes corpus decisions; they have produced a Burmese dictionary (1991) and a Burmese-English dictionary (1993). Burmese is written in a spelling reflecting 13th-century pronunciation, which was slightly reformed in the 1970s to distinguish words formerly written the same, with a final ‘ɲ’, according to their modern pronunciation: /ĩ/ written with a Pali shortened form, and literary High /i/ or spoken Low /ɛ/ (or /e/ in a few words) written with the traditional full final ‘ɲ’. Burmese spelling consistently retains some forms which are not distinguished in modern pronunciation, such as ‘r’, which is now pronounced as /y/ (though it occurs in loanwords, such as / rediyo/ ‘radio’ and the Pali loanword /dəreiʔshã/ ‘animal’), and distinguishes some graphic final consonants which are never distinguished in pronunciation, such as ‘p’ versus ‘t’ and ‘m’ versus ‘n’. Spelling is an obstacle, especially for second-language learners, who are nearly half the population. Frequent but variable processes not reflected in spelling are reduction of some nonfinal syllables in many words to /ə/ and juncture voicing of many voiceless consonants. Variation in Burmese phonology is discussed in Bradley (2011, 2016a, 2021). Some current phonological variables are the merger of /wuʔ/ and /wũ/ into /wiʔ/ and /wĩ/, and of aspirated /sh/ into unaspirated /s/. There are also morphological variables, such as the form of the spoken Low plural suffix /twe/ or /te/, and syntactic variables, such as three alternative reflexive constructions, one of which is literary High and two of which are spoken Low (Bradley, 2005). Burmese is a diglossic language; all grammatical elements have archaic literary High and spoken Low forms, among other lexical differences (Okell & Allott, 2001). The literary High is used in schools, government and most written contexts, also sometimes in formal spoken contexts such as media, speeches and lectures; the Low is used in everyday speech and informal written contexts (Saw Tun, 2005). In most cases, the system is the same; for example, the demonstrative ‘that’ is /tho/ in High and /ho/ in Low Burmese. In a few cases, there are extra forms in the High, for example the demonstrative ‘this’ is /i/ or /θi/ in High and /di/ in Low. Occasionally, the additional 228
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High forms make grammatical distinctions absent from the Low; for example, postverbal High /i/ indicates continuative realis, High /θi/ indicates noncontinuative realis, but Low /tɛ/ indicates all realis. Most verbs also have a two-syllable High form used in more formal contexts; the Low form or the less formal High form is usually the first syllable. High forms are sometimes used in everyday speech: plural suffix High /-myà/ instead of Low /twe/ ~ /te/ and so on; but Low forms are not used in High context. Jenny and San San Hnin Tun (2016) is a valuable recent grammar. Nine of the 134 recognised indigenous minority ethnic groups of Burma speak languages closely related to Burmese. These retain some archaic features; for example, Arakanese (also known as Rakhine since 1990) retains /r/ and Intha retains medial /l/, but they are gradually converging toward standard Burmese. Marma as spoken in Bangladesh reflects the language of the Arakanese royal court which fled the Burmese invasion in 1784; its vowel system is quite different from that of modern Arakanese (Bradley, 1985). This convergence is ongoing; for example, Burmese words with /mi/ such as ‘fire’ are now usually pronounced the same way in southern Arakanese, but /mẽĩ/ in northern Arakanese as in Marma. The other 125 minority ethnic groups have many distinct languages; 98 are also Tibeto-Burman; 10 are Shan/Tai, whose languages are closely related to Thai and Lao; and 12 with Mon-Khmer languages including Mon which are distantly related to Khmer and Vietnamese. There are also two groups who speak Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) languages, one group off the south coast who speak Moken, an Austronesian language, and two groups who speak Indic languages related to Bangla (Bradley, 2016b), also the Rohingya who are not recognised as an indigenous ethnic group by the current military government, though the National Unity Government representing the elected leadership which opposes the military coup of February 2021 does recognise them. Seven large ethnic groups (Arakanese, Chin, Kachin, Shan, Kayah, Karen and Mon) have separate states and most have long had some basic education in these languages. In accord with the 2008 Constitution, the 2014 National Education Law and the 2015 Ethnic Rights Law and with the assistance of UNICEF (Lo Bianco, 2016), most other recognised indigenous languages have recently been introduced in early primary education. Most of these minority languages are well maintained and widely used within their groups. Many have long-established romanisations, some use modified Burmese scripts, including some Karen and Chin languages and Shan/Tai lik Tai ‘Tai writing’ used by most Shan/Tai groups. Members of minority groups are severely disadvantaged in official education, which uses literary High Burmese with exam-based assessment. There are substantial Christian systems of education for some minorities who were converted during the British colonial period. Traditional monastery-based education for Buddhist male children also continues in some areas. The main foreign language of Burma is English; during the colonial period, this was used in most education and widely spoken, but levels have declined greatly since 1948. When speaking English, most speakers of Burmese show various second-language characteristics; for example, the English diphthong /ai/ is usually pronounced /ãĩ/.
Thailand Thai is the national and official language and the mother tongue of over a third of the population in the central region of the country, and a second speech variety for speakers of various varieties of Lao in the northeast, Northern Thai in the north and Southern Thai in the south of the country, another half of the population. All are closely related Southwestern Tai languages; additional related languages are spoken in surrounding countries. Thai is also the mother tongue of most urban ethnic Chinese and other long-term foreign population from Asian countries. Thai is also understood by Lao speakers in Laos and many Shan in Burma. About 7 per cent of the population 229
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speak one of 47 indigenous minority languages. The general linguistic situation in Thailand is outlined in Smalley (1994) and in Bradley (forthcoming); the latter also discusses the complex multiethnic sociolinguistic setting of Bangkok. Since 1933, Thailand has a Royal Institute (since 2015 Royal Society) which is responsible for standardising the Thai language. It maintains a dictionary (1950, 1982, 2003) and drafted a national language policy approved by the government in 2020, recognising language rights including mother-tongue education for minorities. The main body implementing the standardisation and spread of Thai is the Ministry of Education and its Khurusapha (textbook printing office). The Office of National Identity and various other government bodies are also involved in promoting the national language; for a historical overview, see Diller (1991). Iwasaki and Ingkapirom (2005) is an excellent grammar of standard Thai. Thai script was originally based on Khmer script, adapted since 1283 to write Thai. There is also a variant script which is more similar to Khmer script, the Tham (Pali dhamma ‘religious law’) script, used for some religious and astrological purposes. The major phonological variable in central Thai is /r/, which is very often replaced by /l/; as medials, both are often deleted from initial clusters. Other variables include /s/, which can also be pronounced as [θ], especially by younger and lower-status speakers in Bangkok, the capital, and various other consonants. Another area of ongoing variation and change is in the pitch values of the various tones of central Thai; these developments have been traced over several centuries by Pittiyaporn (2016, 2018). For example, the high tone was convex (rising-falling), but became concave (falling-rising) from about 50 years ago. In very recent years, the tone which formerly had a high falling pitch now usually has an initial pitch rise before the fall. There are also regional differences within central Thai; for example, the low rising tone of standard Thai variably merges with the high falling tone in western central areas. Thai linguists do extensive research on variation and change in Thai, mainly published in Thai. Differences between central Thai and the regional varieties of the north, northeast and south are much greater; there is also much more internal differentiation within each of these than within central Thai, especially in tone systems. Northern Thai is also known as Kham Myang ‘city talk’, or as Nyuan or Yuan (the merger of /ɲ/ to /y/ is one instance where Northern Thai and Lao preserve a distinction present in Thai orthography but absent from modern central Thai pronunciation). Its very distinct orthography is called Lanna (‘million rice fields’) script from the name of the former Northern Thai kingdom. This Lanna script is now undergoing a folkloristic revival. In the northeast of Thailand, also known as Isan, the local speech includes a very wide range of varieties of Lao, all more or less similar to the standard Vientiane variety of the national language of Laos, but literacy is in standard central Thai. The Thai Buddhist population of southern Thailand speak Pak Tai (‘southern mouth’) which is also very distinct from central Thai; unlike other varieties, it maintains the /r/ which is a sociolinguistic variable elsewhere, or is replaced by /h/ initially in Northern Thai and in Lao. In some regional urban centres, there is central Thai influence on the phonology of the local speech; for example, Chiangmai in the north has a tone system which has converged towards that of the standard. All speakers of regional varieties of Thai have extensive variation depending on interlocutors and domains, and shift to standard central Thai in formal contexts and in writing. In the last 10 years, a very extensive literature on linguistic landscapes (use of languages in public signage) has developed in Thailand and extending to surrounding countries (for example Siwina & Prasithrasint, 2020); standard Thai, Lanna in the north, English, some traditional and simplified Chinese are the most widely seen. There is also excellent work on Thai discourse structure by various Thai scholars. 230
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Thai has an ancient stratum of Chinese loanwords including most numerals. Many Khmer loans including much of the honorific vocabulary but also everyday words such as tamruat ‘police’, a large number of Pali loans related to Buddhism and the massive influx of recent English loans are written with Thai script in ways which reflect the source language, but are pronounced integrated into Thai phonology. Most polysyllabic English loanwords are written and pronounced with a high falling tone on the final syllable. The largest linguistic minorities are the Malay in the south, the Khmer in the northeast and the urban Teochiu Chinese (a Min variety of Chinese) who came from the Chaozhou area of southeastern China, mainly in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Fifty years ago, only seven hill tribes in the far north and west were recognised, but there are now 47; some groups formerly categorised together have been separated, and additional groups in the northeast and south have been added. Most of the minority groups in the north and west speak Tibeto-Burman languages, most of which are also spoken in Burma and some in China. In the far north, there are also speakers of Hmong and Mien, as in Burma, northern Laos, northern Vietnam and China. Most of the minority groups in the northeast speak Mon-Khmer languages; some speak Tai languages less closely related to Thai than the major regional varieties. In the south there are two minority groups who speak Austronesian languages related to Malay. One minority group may have several names; for example, the Lahu are usually called Musur in Thai, and were formerly called Lohei in China; the Lahu Shi ‘yellow Lahu’ subgroup is also known as Kwi in Shan and Lao. Some Thai minority group categories have very great internal linguistic complexity; there are over twenty languages and many further subvarieties within the Karen ethnic category, known as Kariang in Thai and as Yang in northern Thai and Shan; all are recognised as separate ethnic groups with their own names in Burma, but grouped together in Thailand. The English term Karen is from an earlier pronunciation of the Burmese general term now pronounced Kayin. Thai government policy requires new scripts for minority languages to be based on Thai script; older romanised scripts are also in use for groups who also live in Burma, such as Lahu. Various Thai universities, NGOs and religious organisations assist minority groups with language education and language maintenance, permitted by the national language policy (UNESCO, 2021). For in-depth case studies on Bisu and Gong, see Bradley and Bradley (2019). There is also ethnic conflict in the far south of the country, where Moslem ethnic Malay feel marginalised; teaching Malay language in government schools using a Thai-based script for Malay is helping to reduce this (Premsrirat & Hirsh, 2018). The main foreign language is English, which is taught from early primary school; as the materials and teaching are often problematic, the results are not ideal. There is a distinctive Thai accent in English; for example, English ‘sh’ /ʃ/ is consistently replaced by Thai /tɕh/ (like English ‘ch’ /tʃ/) as there is no /ʃ/ in Thai; final ‘l’ is replaced by /n/ and so on. The only quantified study of Thai English phonology and morphosyntax is Bradley and Bradley (1984).
Laos Lao is the national and official language of Laos according to the 1993 constitution. It has well over 3.5 million ethnic Lao mother-tongue speakers and nearly as many ethnic minority secondlanguage speakers in Laos. It is also the first language of a third of the population of Thailand, mainly those in or from the northeast. There are eight times as many mother-tongue speakers of Lao in Thailand as in Laos; in Thailand they are literate in Thai rather than in Lao and also speak standard Thai. There are many villages of different varieties of Lao in the central plains of 231
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Thailand; some Lao also live in northwestern Vietnam and northeastern Cambodia. There are also post-1974 refugees from Laos in many western countries; these include some ethnic Lao and also many ethnic Hmong and other groups. Lao has a distinct orthography and a very different standard from Thai; in Thailand, Lao is not written. The Lao script dates to the 14th-century Lan Xang (‘million elephants’) kingdom. From 1949 to 1970 there was a government Literary Committee, succeeded from 1970 to 1974 by the Royal Lao Academy, setting Lao language standards and publishing a standard grammar. From 1967, there was a competing standard in areas ruled by the Communist Pathet Lao (‘Lao nation’), implemented nationwide in 1974. Until 1974 there was ambiguity about the standard pronunciation of Lao, with some prestige attached to the northern variety spoken in the former royal capital, Luang Phabang, and some nearby northern areas including Loei Province in Thailand. However, since then, the sole standard is the variety spoken in the capital, Vientiane (wiang caan ‘moon city’ or ‘sandalwood city’). This is different from the speech of Luang Phabang and the north, especially in the tone system and the lack of former vocabulary associated with the royal court and Buddhism. The varieties of Lao spoken in northeastern Thailand apart from Loei Province are more similar to the speech of Vientiane, but again with tone and other differences; the variety spoken in most of Nakorn Ratchasima (Khorat) Province in the southwest of northeastern Thailand is transitional between Lao and central Thai, both lexically and phonologically. Enfield (2007) is a grammatical description of the standard variety of Vientiane Lao which reflects the minor reform of Lao spelling implemented in 1967 in Pathet Lao areas and in 1974 nationwide. This eliminated various unpronounced consonants, notably medial ‘r’ as in Luang Phrabang, and increased the distinctness between Lao and Thai. Lao continues to be heavily influenced by Thai, even in Laos. There are regular correspondences between Thai and Lao; for example, the Thai word prachum ‘meeting’ corresponds to Lao pasum as Lao lacks medial /r/ and has /s/, often romanised as ‘x’, everywhere that Thai has /tɕh/. While most people in Laos can easily understand Thai, few people in Thailand from outside the northeast can fully understand Lao. The 49 ethnic minorities of Laos enumerated in the 2015 census are just under half the total population; 33, sometimes collectively called Lao Theung, speak Mon-Khmer languages, mostly in the hills of the centre, east and south of the country. Seven minorities, collectively called Lao Lum along with the Lao majority, have Tai languages, mostly southwestern Tai like the national language, and live along rivers. There are also six Tibeto-Burman groups in the far north and two groups with Hmong-Mien languages in the north central area; these are collectively called Lao Sung and live mainly at higher altitudes. There are also ethnic Chinese, both Yunnanese Mandarin speakers who are a recognised ethnic minority under the name Ho (also written ‘Haw’ in Thailand) in the far north, and some other southeastern coastal Chinese varieties in some cities. The Ho were originally Mandarin-speaking Moslem rebels who fled from Yunnan into Laos, northeastern Burma and northern Thailand in the late 19th century. For more on policies for the minorities of Laos, see Godineau (2003); concerning the sociolinguistic outcomes of the contact between them and the Lao majority, see Enfield (2003). The names and ethnic and linguistic status of many of the smaller ethnic groups speaking MonKhmer languages in the southeast and Tibeto-Burman languages in the far north are complex; some additional languages whose speakers do not have separate ethnic minority status are still occasionally being located. For example, among the six currently recognised ethnic groups with Tibeto-Burman languages, there are at least 13 languages; see Bradley (1996, forthcoming). The changes through time are substantial: since 1996, the Kwi (Lahu Shi) ethnic group was abolished and re-amalgamated into the related Muxoe (Lahu) ethnic group; the Phunoi went through a name change to Singsali and back to Phunoi. The Chepya, Cosao, Gokhu and Luma groups with their 232
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distinct languages are part of the Ko (Akha) ethnic group. These four and Phana, Khatu and Lahu Shi are not currently recognised as separate ethnic groups. Education and literacy in the mother tongue for some large minority ethnic groups such as the Hmong, Mien and Khmu was available before 1974. Among the refugee Hmong overseas, a romanisation continues in wide use. From 2009, there was a new impetus for inclusive education, employing ethnic minority teachers to facilitate rapid transition to the use of Lao as the sole written language of education. There is no written use of ethnic minority languages in government schools (Meyers, 2019). However, there is limited use of spoken Hmong and Khmu, the minority groups with the largest population, on national TV and radio, and some additional languages on provincial radio, but Lao dominates the internal media scene, with wide access to Thai media in areas closer to Thailand. Like the other Indochina nations, between 1893 and 1953 Laos went through a period of French education and use of French as an elite language; until 1965 French continued in use as the sole medium of secondary education. English started to replace French as the main foreign language from the mid-1960s. From 1975, Russian and more recently Mandarin Chinese started to spread, but English remains a popular foreign language, as well as some residual French.
Cambodia Khmer is a Mon-Khmer language and the national language of Cambodia, spoken by the entire population, including by all minority groups as a second language. Of the five countries discussed here, Cambodia is ethnically the most homogeneous, has the highest proportion of members of the ethnic majority group and the fewest minority groups. Khmer is also spoken by over 1.3 million ethnic Khmer in the Mekong delta region of southern Vietnam, about 800,000 ethnic Khmer along the Cambodian border in northeastern Thailand, a few in far southern Laos and many post-1974 refugees in western countries. In addition, the ancestors of much of the population of eastern central Thailand were Khmer and still spoke Khmer in the 19th century, but their descendants have now become Thai. Of the indigenous minorities, 16 speak or spoke indigenous Mon-Khmer languages more or less closely related to Khmer, and two speak Austronesian Chamic languages. There is a large Vietnamese population in southeastern Cambodia along the Mekong River and a substantial and mainly urban Chinese population. The ethnic Chinese were a particular target of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1978 and are very heavily represented among refugees from Cambodia in western countries. The same is true of the Moslem Cham group; their diaspora also includes some other Southeast Asian countries, notably Malaysia. The Cham originally came to the Kampong Cham area of northeastern Cambodia from southern Vietnam about 400 years ago, when the Vietnamese conquered their traditional area near the coast north of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. Since AD 609, Khmer has been written in a script derived from Indic sources. The standard orthography reflects the pronunciation of the Angkor period. An unpopular romanisation was briefly used from 1943 to 1945 under Japanese tutelage. Since the script was devised, there have been major sound changes; the same vowel symbol represents completely different modern vowels, depending on whether the initial consonant was originally voiced with breathy phonation on the syllable, or voiceless with normal phonation on the syllable. In some varieties, including the standard speech of the capital, Phnom Penh, these initial voicing contrasts have been lost; in other varieties, the voicing contrast persists; and in some varieties, including those spoken in northeastern Thailand, the vowel system is more conservative and more closely reflects the Khmer orthography. 233
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Standard Phnom Penh Khmer has a remarkably complex vowel system. Starting from the original orthographic system with nine long and nine short monophthongal vowels and three long and three short diphthongs, it now has nine short and ten long monophthongal vowels and 13 diphthongs, including a contrast of five distinct vowel heights for front monophthongal vowels. There is a great deal of sociolinguistic variation of vowel quality in Phnom Penh speech, as discussed and quantified in Pisitpanporn (2002). In addition to its basic Mon-Khmer stratum, Khmer has some early borrowings from Sanskrit and many later Theravada Buddhist borrowings from Pali. Much of the formal register vocabulary of Thai and Lao is borrowed from Khmer; the Thai and Lao scripts were also derived from the Khmer script. After the decline of Angkor and the rise of Thai kingdoms, Khmer started to borrow Thai words. Under French rule, the elite learned French and many French loanwords came in. From 1975, the Khmer Rouge discarded much of the Indic and other foreign vocabulary; some came back after 1979. Now, some English loanwords are coming in. A National Commission worked from 1915 to standardise Khmer spelling, finally publishing volume 1 of a dictionary in 1938 and volume 2 in 1943. The Ministry of Education set up a Textbook Committee in 1932 which has published a wide range of textbooks and literature. In 1947, a National Cultural Commission was established to coin new words, and later published a dictionary. In 1955, Khmer replaced French as the medium of education in government schools; of course Khmer and Pali were in continuous use in Buddhist monastery education up to 1975. The Khmer Rouge prescribed rural forms and eliminated high-status and polite pronoun forms and other formal lexicon; for example, they allowed only /hop/ for ‘to eat’, and banned 11 other words. Some of the former vocabulary was brought back into use after 1979 (Thel Thong, 1985). Huffman (1970) is an excellent grammar of spoken Khmer, and includes information on the rich range of formal registers. French was imposed as the colonial language from 1864; from the 1960s, English gradually replaced French as the main foreign language, though the elite continued to use French. The problems of English language learning for refugees from Cambodia in western countries after 1975 are discussed in Rado et al. (1986). Under Vietnamese tutelage for some years after 1979, Vietnamese was also widely used as a second language in Cambodia. Since the 1990s, the government has allowed use of indigenous languages other than Khmer in education (Kosonen, 2019; UNESCO, 2021). All use scripts based on Khmer script. The 2007 Education Law and subsequent guidelines and decrees allow local choice for minority language education. However, many of the indigenous minority languages of Cambodia, particularly those of the Pear ethnic group in the west of the country, are no longer spoken; and some others are endangered, especially the languages of some of the smaller groups in the northeast of the country.
Vietnam Vietnamese is the national language of Vietnam; the ethnic Vietnamese are known in Vietnamese as Kinh. Northern Vietnam was ruled by China for more than a millennium up to AD 939, and there was profound cultural and linguistic influence which has persisted: structural effects on Vietnamese phonology and syntax, long-term use of a Chinese character script to write Vietnamese and very extensive loanwords from Chinese, including the name of the country. This name was borrowed from an older Chinese variety: Việt is an old place name for southern China including modern Guangdong and Guangxi provinces and northern Vietnam, and nam is ‘south’. The corresponding words are now pronounced Yuènán in modern Mandarin; this is still the Chinese name of Vietnam. Over the last millennium, Vietnam and the ethnic Kinh gradually expanded to the south, 234
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conquering Cham kingdoms in the centre and taking the south from the declining Khmer empire. After French colonial rule from the 19th century and many years of conflict from 1954, Vietnam has been unified since 1975 under the government which ruled the north since 1954. According to the 2019 census, the ethnic majority Kinh or Vietnamese are over 85 per cent of the population or more than 82 million; nearly all the rest of the population also speaks Vietnamese in addition to a language of one of the 53 recognised ethnic minority groups. There is also a large ethnic Vietnamese minority in south-eastern Cambodia, and a small minority of about 30,000, known in Chinese as Jīng, in southwestern Guangxi in China. There is also a small post-1954 refugee population in southern Laos and northeastern Thailand, and a very large post-1975 refugee population in many western countries. Vietnamese is a Mon-Khmer language; the most closely related languages are those of the Mường, Thồ and Chứt ethnic groups of the west central hills who are over 1.5 million people or about 1.6 per cent of the population. Other Mon-Khmer languages are spoken by 21 additional groups totalling nearly 3 million people with 3.1 per cent of the population; the largest such group is Khmer, all the other groups are much smaller. Within some of these groups, there is more than one distinct language. There are seven groups totalling over 5 million people or 5.2 per cent in the north who speak Tai languages. Five very small groups in the far north with a total of 33,421 people speak Kadai languages distantly related to the Tai languages; these are also spoken in China, mainly by members of the Gēlǎo national minority there. The five groups with nearly 1.8 million people or 1.9 per cent who speak Austronesian Chamic languages live mainly in the southern highlands, with two also extending into Cambodia. There are three ethnic groups of nearly 2.3 million overall (2.4 per cent) in the north known as Mông (Hmong), Dao (Yao, including Mien and some closely related languages) and Pàthẻn who speak Hmong-Mien languages; six small ethnic groups of under 60,000 total with Tibeto-Burman languages, also in the north; and three ethnic groups who speak Sinitic languages with under a million people; the latter is probably an underestimate as some urban people with Chinese background identify as Kinh. All the Tibeto-Burman, HmongMien, Tai and Kadai languages are also spoken by larger minority groups in various adjacent countries; many of the Mon-Khmer languages are spoken only in Vietnam, though some extend into Laos, Cambodia or China. The smallest groups with the most endangered languages are the various languages of the Chứt and Thồ ethnic groups, which also extend into southern Laos. All Kadai languages are endangered in Vietnam and in China, but some are more vigorous in Vietnam than in China where they originated. Though Vietnamese is a Mon-Khmer language, it was long written using Chinese characters, the Chữ Nôm (‘southern writing’) script; this still has some limited scholarly use. In 1910, during the French colonial period, the government replaced this with the Quốc Ngữ (‘national language’) romanisation devised by the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes in the early 17th century, which is still in use. Romanisations based on the same principles are also used in the scripts for some of Vietnam’s 53 minority ethnic groups, which thus differ from the romanisations used for the same languages in adjacent countries. The standard dialect of Vietnamese, based on the speech of Hanoi, the capital, has six tones; these are indicated by diacritics above or below the vowel of each syllable. The central and southern dialects merge the two higher and lower pitch falling-rising tones, curve tone hỏi and broken tone ngã, and some rural central subdialects have only four tones. The pitch values of the tones also show some regional differences; for example, in Hue, the former royal capital, level tone ngang and falling tone huyền have higher pitch than elsewhere, and rising tone sắc has lower pitch. Other regional differences include the central and southern merger of syllable-final /c/ and /ɲ/, written ‘ch’ and ‘nh’, into final /t/ and /n/, written ‘t’ and ‘n’. Non-northern speakers vary and adapt 235
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toward the standard system in formal speech, and everyone always writes using the full six-tone system and final ‘ch’ and ‘nh’ in the appropriate words. Ngo (2020) provides a full grammatical description of standard Vietnamese. A 1979 Standardization Conference reunified the lexicon of the language, which had diverged since 1954. Vietnamese is the medium of education throughout the country, including in minority areas. Recently, some minority languages are used in early primary education for up to three years, in transition to Vietnamese (Nguyen & Nguyen, 2019). During the French colonial period, French was the dominant foreign language, but since the 1960s English has mainly replaced it. In schools, English is now taught from Grade 6, and will soon start to be taught from Grade 3. There are close contacts with the millions of post-1975 Vietnamese refugees, who are mainly in Anglophone countries (Tollefson, 1989). Initially, English was a problem for these refugees (Rado et al., 1986), but now their bilingualism is an advantage and helps to connect Vietnam with the world.
References Allott, A. J. (1985). Language policy and language planning in Burma. In D. Bradley (Ed.), Language policy, language planning and sociolinguistics in Southeast Asia (pp. 131–154). Pacific Linguistics A-67. Bradley, D. (1985). Arakanese vowels. In G. Thurgood, J. A. Matisoff, & D. Bradley (Eds.), Linguistics of the Sino-Tibetan area: The state of the art (pp. 180–200). Pacific Linguistics C-87. Bradley, D. (1996). Tibeto-Burman languages in PDR Lao. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 19(1), 19–29. Bradley, D. (2005). Reflexives in literary and spoken Burmese. In J. Watkins (Ed.), Studies in Burmese Linguistics (pp. 67–86). Pacific Linguistics 570. Bradley, D. (2011). Changes in Burmese phonology and orthography. Keynote presented at Southeast Asian linguistics society 21st annual conference. Bangkok, 12 May 2011. https://academia.edu/1559757/ Changes_in_Burmese_Phonology_and_Orthography Bradley, D. (2016a). Language in Myanmar. In A. Simpson, H. Farrelly, & I. Holliday (Eds.), Handbook of contemporary Myanmar (pp. 117–125). Routledge. Bradley, D. (2016b). The languages of Myanmar. Report to LESC Initiative. Bangkok: UNICEF. www.academia.edu/32976865/The_Languages_of_Myanmar Bradley, D. (2019). Minority language learning in mainland Southeast Asia. In A. Kirkpatrick & A. J. Liddicoat (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of language education policy in Asia (pp. 14–28). Routledge. Bradley, D. (2021). Typological profile of Burmic languages. In P. Sidwell & M. Jenny (Eds.), The languages and linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia (pp. 299–336). Walter de Gruyter. Bradley, D. forthcoming. East and Southeast Asia. In C. Moseley & R. E. Asher (Eds.), Atlas of the world’s languages (3rd ed.). Routledge. Bradley, D., & Bradley, M. (1984). Problems of Asian students in Australia: Language, culture and education. Australian Government Publishing Service. Bradley, D., & Bradley, M. (2019). Language endangerment. Cambridge University Press. Bradley, D., Roberts, J., Cummings, J., Ramly, A., Woods, P., Sarwao Rini, K., Wolff, J. U., & Xuan Thu, N. (1998). South-East Asia phrasebook. Lonely Planet. Diller, A. V. (1991). What makes Central Thai a national language? In C. J. Reynolds (Ed.), National identity and its defenders (pp. 87–132). Centre of South-East Asian Studies, Monash University. Enfield, N. J. (2003). Linguistic epidemiology: Semantics and grammar of language contact in South-East Asia. RoutledgeCurzon. Enfield, N. J. (2007). A grammar of Lao. Mouton. Godineau, Y. (Ed.). (2003). Laos and ethnic minority cultures: Promoting heritage. UNESCO. Huffman, F. E. (1970). An outline of Cambodian grammar. Yale University Press. Iwasaki, S., & Ingkapirom, P. (2005). A reference grammar of Thai. Cambridge University Press. Jenny, M., & San San Hnin Tun, 2016. Burmese: A comprehensive Grammar. Routledge. Kosonen, K. (2019). Language education policy in Cambodia. In A. Kirkpatrick & A. J. Liddicoat (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of language education policy in Asia (pp. 216–228). Routledge.
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19 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN MARITIME SOUTHEAST ASIA Rebecca Lurie Starr
Introduction The Malay archipelago, also known as Maritime Southeast Asia, is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world and features a comparably rich sociolinguistic ecology. The region is home to hundreds of indigenous languages in the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian language family, including Javanese, Malay, and Tagalog, among many others. A long history of cross-linguistic contact via trade and migration involving indigenous groups, Chinesespeaking peoples, and other communities in the region has led to the development of several pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages, including Bazaar Malay, Kristang, and Philippine Hybrid Hokkien. Maritime Southeast Asia has also experienced waves of Western colonization by Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United States. As a result of this colonial legacy, most of the countries in the region are traditionally considered to be part of Kachru’s (1985) ‘Outer Circle’ of English, meaning that English is widely used institutionally but not typically learned as a first language in the home. Today, however, the classification of these countries with regard to the function of English has become more problematic, with English now a major home language in some countries and its role shifting in others. Faced with the challenges of managing diverse ethnolinguistic groups and resolving tensions between fostering a distinctive national identity and leveraging the global advantages of colonial languages, countries in Maritime Southeast Asia have adopted various approaches to language planning and language-in-education policy in the postcolonial era. Rising domestic and transnational mobility, along with other societal changes, have led to dramatic language shifts, with some regional ethnic languages rapidly losing ground to languages with greater instrumental value and institutional support. Contact and social change has also led to variation and change within languages themselves, and to shifts in sociolinguistic norms and attitudes towards certain languages and varieties. This chapter reviews the sociolinguistic situations of six countries in Maritime Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia,1 Brunei, Singapore, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste (please see Chapter 29 for a discussion of New Guinea). In the sections that follow, I address the topics of language policy and planning, language shift and revitalization, and finally language variation and change. As many of the communities in the region remain understudied, particularly with regard to sociolinguistic phenomena, this discussion can only present an incomplete picture and point to potential avenues for further research. DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-22 238
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Language policy and planning Sociolinguistic research on language policy and planning in Maritime Southeast Asia has explored how states have balanced concerns of tradition, identity, and modernity in their approaches to the recognition of official languages, language standardization and development, and language-ineducation policies. Scholars have also examined how state ideologies are taken up by families in research on family language policy. Informed by concerns particular to each country, the choice of official languages across this region in the postcolonial era has not been uniform. While some countries have opted to promote the most common local language, others have selected a regional lingua franca or maintained the official status of the colonial language. Indonesia, the most linguistically diverse of the countries under discussion, is distinct among the Maritime Southeast Asian nations in its history as a Dutch colony. Rather than promoting Dutch as a lingua franca, when nation-building efforts began in the early 20th century Indonesia opted to designate Bahasa Indonesia (or ‘Indonesian’), a dialect of Malay, as the nation’s sole official language (Dardjowidjojo, 1998). The choice of Bahasa Indonesia as a national language was motivated by the language’s history as a lingua franca of the region, and the fact that, unlike major regional languages such as Javanese and Sundanese, Malay played a relatively small role as a native language in Indonesia and thus was perceived as a more neutral option (Sneddon, 2003). In Indonesia today, although Indonesian remains the only national language, the state does acknowledge the significance of regional languages in its constitution and encourages regions to take steps to preserve and develop their local languages (Setyabudi, 2017). Malaysia, a former British colony, has also opted to designate Malay as its sole official language. The implications of this choice, however, are quite different from those in Indonesia, due to the distinct linguistic ecologies of these countries. Unlike in Indonesia, Malay is the language associated with Malaysia’s dominant ethnic group. Moreover, non-indigenous groups, including Chinese and Indian communities that are historically non-Malay-speaking, constitute over 38% of the population in Malaysia (Department of Information, 2016). The recognition of only Malay as a national language is in line with Malaysia’s long-standing affirmative action bumiputera policies, which are intended to advance the status of indigenous people in the country (Rappa & Wee, 2006). The extent to which the national language should be framed as representative of all ethnicities or as belonging to the Malay people is reflected in controversy over whether the language ought to be referred to as ‘Bahasa Malaysia’, meaning the language of Malaysia, or as ‘Bahasa Melayu’, the language of Malays (Hassan, 2005). Brunei (formally ‘Brunei Darussalam’) also officially recognizes only Malay as a national language. Like Indonesia and Malaysia, Brunei does not give official status to the other indigenous languages traditionally spoken in the country, such as Belait, or to the languages spoken by its sizable non-indigenous minority communities (Jones, 2012). While Brunei does not recognize English as an official language, it is nonetheless widely used in government, schools, and the workplace, reflecting the country’s history as a British protectorate prior to independence in 1984 (McClellan, 2020). In contrast to the preceding nations, the Philippines does grant English the status of official language, while also recognizing Filipino as its national language. Although ideologically framed as a unifying language that is intended to take on elements of various regional languages, Filipino is essentially a standardized version of Tagalog, the language of one of the country’s major ethnic groups (Kaplan & Baldauf, 2003). Despite its history as a Spanish colony prior to becoming an American territory, the Philippines does not recognize Spanish as an official language, nor does it give national status to other major regional languages of the country, including Cebuano and 239
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Ilocano. As observed by Lorente (2013), the promotion of English in the Philippines is linked to discourse that English proficiency gives Filipino workers a vital advantage in the global marketplace, thus framing English as indispensable to the economic development of the country. Singapore is the only country in the region to grant official recognition to multiple languages associated with different ethnic groups: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil all have the status of official languages. This approach is reflective of the country’s aim to promote multiculturalism (Wee, 2003), a key distinction from the bumiputera policies of Malaysia that contributed to the split of the two nations in the mid-1960s after a brief attempt at merger following independence from Britain. As a result of this historical connection with Malaysia and in recognition of its positioning in the region, despite the country’s Chinese majority, Singapore grants a ceremonial status to Malay as its sole national language (Rappa & Wee, 2006). Nonetheless, English functions as the universal language of instruction in schools and is the country’s primary lingua franca (Dixon, 2005). The selection of Mandarin and Tamil as the languages associated with the Chinese and Indian populations arose from political movements within each community in the early 20th century. Mandarin, for example, was selected over the more commonly spoken Chinese varieties Hokkien, Cantonese, and Teochew, despite being the home language of only 0.1% of Chinese Singaporeans prior to independence (Kuo, 1980), because it had been promoted as a unifying language by the Chinese nationalist movement. Indeed, Singapore has undertaken major efforts to shift its Chinese population to Mandarin; the ongoing Speak Mandarin Campaign, launched in 1979, restricted the use of non-Mandarin varieties in various domains and has resulted in a dramatic decline in the use of these varieties, referred to locally as ‘dialects’ (Rappa & Wee, 2006). While state rhetoric has traditionally framed the language policy of Singapore as a matter of promoting English for instrumental purposes and ‘mother tongue’ languages as serving to connect Singaporeans to their cultural heritage, Wee (2003, p. 211) argues that, as of the 21st century, the narrative has shifted to one of overall ‘linguistic instrumentalism’, with the economic utility of the mother tongue languages increasingly highlighted in national discourse. Another major language planning issue in Singapore is the status of the contact variety Colloquial Singapore English (‘Singlish’) and its relationship with standard English. While the government strongly discouraged the use of Singlish in the past, it has now begun to acknowledge Singlish as an emblem of local identity and has sought to commodify it as a uniquely Singaporean product (Lim, 2015). Timor-Leste (East Timor) is the youngest nation in the region, having achieved independence from Indonesia in 2002. Due to its history as a Portuguese colony since the early 18th century and then a territory of Indonesia after 1976, Portuguese in Timor-Leste became associated not only with the colonial era, but also with nationalism and the struggle for independence during Indonesian occupation (Taylor-Leech, 2019). As a result, both Portuguese and Tetun (or ‘Tetum’), a major indigenous language, were named co-official languages of Timor-Leste. The constitution also calls for Tetun and other indigenous languages to be preserved and developed, and acknowledges that Indonesian and English will be used along with the official languages as working languages of the government ‘as long as deemed necessary’ (Constitution of the Democratic Republic of TimorLeste, 2002). While Portuguese has little utility in the region, it connects Timor-Leste with an international network with a shared cultural history and is perceived to create global opportunities; indeed, the country has received material support in its efforts to transition to Portuguese from Lusophone countries, including Portugal and Brazil (Cabral, 2013). The relationship between official languages and the languages used in education in Maritime Southeast Asia is not straightforward; many of the countries in the region have education systems that integrate English and/or heritage languages that are not recognized as official languages by the state. Singapore has gone the furthest in implementing English-medium instruction, with all 240
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schools shifted to English-medium by the 1980s (Dixon, 2005). At the same time, Singapore has balanced concerns about excessive Westernization by incorporating a compulsory ‘mother tongue’ class into the curriculum, meaning that children are required to study the language officially associated with their ethnic group, regardless of their home language. While alternative options are currently provided for certain Indian languages and a limited number of other world languages, for the most part, students do not have the option to study unofficial heritage languages, including the Chinese varieties historically spoken by the majority of the population. The findings of a survey by Starr and Hiramoto (2019) suggest some ambivalence about the current system, particularly among Chinese Singaporeans and individuals who do not identify as members of one of the ethnic groups associated with an official mother tongue. Although most respondents did want to study a heritage language in school, many were not satisfied with the mother tongue they were assigned or with the level of competence they achieved. With children increasingly speaking primarily English at home, compulsory mother tongue classes have become a source of anxiety for many families. As Starr and Kapoor (2020) demonstrate, enrichment and tuition centers have effectively exploited these concerns, particularly with regard to Mandarin. The Philippines and Brunei both follow a split bilingual system in which certain subjects are taught in English and others in Filipino and Malay, respectively (Young & Igcalinos, 2019; HajiOthman et al., 2019). While the Philippines’ education system maintained a bilingual model for many decades, since a reform implemented in 2013 students have been taught primarily via their regional mother tongues in early primary school, before transitioning to English-Filipino bilingual instruction (Official Gazette, 2016). In addition to educating its own citizens, the Philippines has become a hub for international English language learners. Studies such as Imperial (2016) examine aspects of learner outcomes and attitudes in this setting, including the extent to which they acquire features of Philippine English. Malaysia’s evolving language-in-education policies reflect a range of political and economic concerns. While the country has a colonial legacy of elite English-medium education and a desire to harness English as a tool for development and global engagement, the use of Malay in schools has been ideologically linked with nationalism following independence from Britain. As a result, Malay has historically been prioritized as a medium of instruction. The dominance of Malay-based instruction was briefly challenged in the early 2000s, when Malaysia attempted to implement a Philippines-like system in which science and mathematics were taught via English, with the aim of facilitating economic development. Following political difficulties, however, instruction in these subjects reverted back to Malay in 2012 (Gill & Hani, 2019). Another notable element of the Malaysian education landscape is Chinese-medium and Tamil-medium education. Unlike in Singapore, in which schools of this type were converted to the mainstream model, these ‘vernacularmedium’ schools survive and continue to serve the Chinese and Indian communities in Malaysia, although some institutions have partially converted their medium of instruction to Malay to qualify for government funding. Reasons for the continued success of these schools include the desire to transmit cultural identity and, in the case of the Chinese community, the international economic opportunities associated with learning Mandarin (Wong, 2018). In Indonesia, while Indonesian has remained the primary medium of instruction since the mid20th century, policy changes in the late 1990s and early 2000s have given regions more autonomy over curricula and have encouraged regions to teach local cultural content. As a result, certain local languages are now formally incorporated into the curricula of schools more strongly than others (Kohler, 2019). Although English is a highly valued foreign language associated with upward economic mobility, and is particularly relevant for the millions of Indonesians who work overseas, the government has moved in recent years to reduce the role of English in the national curriculum. In 241
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a series of revisions begun in 2013, English was demoted to the status of an optional subject and a program of elite ‘international standard’ schools that offered English-medium instruction was discontinued (Kohler, 2019). As demand for English-medium instruction remains strong, however, many private schools still offer substantial English content. Zen and Starr (2021), for example, investigate two branches of a trilingual immersion primary school in East Java in which classes are taught via Indonesian, English, and Javanese. Language-in-education policy in Timor-Leste has faced various challenges in the years since independence. Transitioning the education system from Indonesian-medium to Portuguesemedium and Tetun-medium was a major undertaking; few teachers were proficient in Portuguese, and literacy in Tetun was not widespread (Cabral, 2013). In the 2010s, education policy underwent another major shift when the state began to implement pilot studies of mother tongue-medium schooling in the early primary years. Although these programs are argued to be successful in terms of learning outcomes, they have also been met with criticism due to their association with Anglophone NGOs and concerns that indigenous language education is counterproductive to nationbuilding, will foster division between linguistic groups, and reifies the identification of particular languages with particular regions (Cabral, 2013; Taylor-Leech, 2019). In recent years, scholars have extended the investigation of language policy to the field of family language policy, which focuses on the negotiation of language practices at the family level (see King et al., 2008). Several studies have applied a family language policy perspective to Singapore, including the work of Curdt-Christiansen (2016) and Wang (2019) on Chinese Singaporean families and Balasubramaniam’s (2019) study of Tamil Indian Singaporean parents. According to Balasubramaniam, despite a shift towards linguistic instrumentalism in state rhetoric (see preceding discussion), the relatively low economic utility of Tamil does not appear to have led to a push for children to learn Mandarin among Tamil Singaporeans. Rather, the belief that language education should function as a means of intergenerational cultural transmission continues to dominate in this community. Further work on family language policy elsewhere in Maritime Southeast Asia is needed to illuminate how families manage multilingual language learning in these diverse settings.
Language shift and revitalization As a result of language planning, rising mobility, cultural assimilation, and expanded access to education, Maritime Southeast Asia is experiencing widespread language shifts on a number of fronts. Here, I focus on three changes underway across multiple nations in the region: the expansion of English, the shift from Chinese dialects to Mandarin, and the decline of regional and minority languages. I then briefly address the rising interest in maintaining and revitalizing these languages. The Anglophone colonial history of this region and continued use of English in the postcolonial era has yielded several ‘new Englishes’: Brunei English, Malaysian English, Philippine English, and Singapore English are all conventionalized forms of English widely used in their respective countries. Of these varieties, Singapore English has seen the most dramatic rise in recent years. In 2015, English surpassed Mandarin as the most commonly used home language in Singapore; a further jump was found in the 2020 census, with English the most common language of 48.3% of households (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2021). Research on new Englishes in the contact linguistics and world Englishes traditions has flourished in this region, examining topics including the origins of various features of these contact varieties and ideologies regarding their legitimacy. Scholarship in this area has highlighted the limitations of Kachru’s (1985) traditional circles model of world Englishes, which places all of these English varieties in the Outer Circle, eliding crucial 242
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differences in their status and use and providing no framework for the evolution of their status over time. Thus, recent work has engaged more heavily with Schneider’s (2003) Dynamic Model of postcolonial Englishes, which sets forth a series of proposed phases in which the local variety stabilizes and the community’s orientation shifts from external to internal norms. At the same time, Park and Wee (2009) argue that the notion of an ‘Outer Circle’ of English remains relevant from an ideological perspective. They stress that although varieties such as Singapore English are now learned as a first language in the home, they still lack perceived legitimacy relative to Inner Circle Englishes. This view is supported by evidence from the language attitudes literature. Chia (2022), for example, finds that both Singaporean and non-Singaporean teachers working in international schools in Singapore rate Singapore English lower than American, British, and Australian English on correctness, clarity, prestige, expressiveness, and pleasantness. Due to the migration history of the region, the large Chinese community in Maritime Southeast Asia consists primarily of the descendants of immigrants from southeastern regions of China who spoke a number of mutually unintelligible southern Chinese varieties, including Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka, and Hainanese. While many of these communities continue to speak localized versions of these dialects, Mandarin has made inroads across the region as a result of the rise of Mandarin-medium education, inter-dialect marriage, the resurgence of mainland China as a global economic and cultural power, and, in the case of Singapore, national language policy (see the preceding discussion of the Speak Mandarin Campaign). The intergenerational decline in dialect use has been documented in work such as Ting and Sussex’s (2002) study of the Foochow community in Malaysia and Gupta and Yeok’s (1995) ethnography of interaction in a Cantonese Singaporean family. The shift towards Mandarin has reached even the most insular, linguistically conservative Chinese communities in the region, as observed by Stenberg (2015) regarding the Kalimantan Hakka community in Indonesia. In Singapore, census and research data suggest that the Speak Mandarin Campaign and the rise of English have succeeded in marginalizing nonMandarin dialects to the point of imminent extinction. Wong and Tan (2017), a survey-based comparison of Malaysian, Singaporean, and mainland Chinese respondents, reports that while 36% of Malaysians claim to still use dialects with interlocutors of their own generation or younger, only 2% of Singaporean respondents do so. Despite this decline in use, interest in dialects remains strong in Singapore, particularly in the case of Cantonese, perhaps due to its association with Hong Kong media and culture (Starr & Hiramoto, 2019). As in other parts of the world, local languages in Maritime Southeast Asia are losing ground to languages with greater institutional support and economic utility. In Indonesia, for example, Indonesian, previously a lingua franca learned as a second language, is beginning to replace regional languages as the primary home language. Crucially, this shift is seen even in areas that historically speak major languages, such as Javanese. In their 2014 paper, ‘Can a Language with Millions of Speakers Be Endangered?’, Ravindranath and Cohn argue that the dramatic scale of disruption in intergenerational transmission of Javanese means that even this language is not “too big to fail” (2014, p. 73). Research on the situation of Javanese suggests that the social meanings of the languages involved have contributed to this shift: Javanese, with its multiple politeness registers, is associated with rurality, poverty, and traditional, hierarchical societal structures, while Indonesian is linked with urban modernity and egalitarianism (Smith-Hefner, 2009). Greater assimilation of minority communities is also leading to reduced use of their distinctive languages. In the Manila region of the Philippines, use of Philippine Hybrid Hokkien (also known as Lánnang-uè), a unique mixed language developed in the Chinese Filipino community, is on the decline as community members have begun to identify more strongly as Filipino (Gonzales, 2021). 243
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While many regional and minority languages are subject to ongoing decline, language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization efforts are also taking place throughout the region. Certain institutional efforts are being made to maintain regional languages, as in the aforementioned initiatives to expand mother tongue-medium education in the Philippines and Timor-Leste; the majority of revitalization efforts, however, originate from non-governmental organizations (e.g., Collins et al., 2020) and at the grassroots level. Spearheaded by younger members of the community, minority languages such as Lánnang-uè in the Philippines and the creoles Kristang and Baba Malay in Singapore have been the focus of grassroots revitalization efforts that incorporate social media messaging strategies (The Lannang Archives, 2022; Kodrah Kristang, 2022; BabaMalay. com, 2022). As is suggested by these examples, interest in exploring identity via heritage languages is on the rise among the younger generation, particularly with regard to languages that were previously considered illegitimate or undesirable by the community. These language movements reflect a broader expanding interest in local heritage, perhaps as a reaction to the region’s fast-paced rate of development and globalization (Starr & Hiramoto, 2019).
Language variation and change Rising mobility, contact, and language shift in Maritime Southeast Asia have inevitably reshaped the features of local languages. Work in the sociolinguistic variation tradition, which has historically focused primarily on Western settings, is increasingly being carried out in the region, illuminating patterns of variation and change in assorted communities and languages. In the area of regional Englishes, several studies have investigated whether increased mobility, rising American media exposure, and the waning influence of British English are triggering ‘Americanization’ of Brunei, Malaysian, and Singapore Englishes. Sharwabi (2022) finds evidence of Americanization of Brunei English in features such as postvocalic rhoticity and the BATHTRAP merger, but also identifies changes that cannot be attributed to Americanization. Deterding (2005), Starr (2019, 2021), and Tan (2016), among others, draw similar conclusions regarding Singapore English; while the variety is moving away from British norms in certain respects, and exhibits some increases in US English-like features, it cannot be said to be undergoing a wholesale shift towards US English. Instead, Singapore English is developing new norms distinct from either variety. Overall, evidence from this work suggests that, as varieties progress through Schneider’s (2003) proposed phase of ‘endonormative stabilization’, their features will increasingly diverge from those of Inner Circle Englishes. Scholarship on variation in other languages of the region is also on the rise. A 2021 special issue of Asia-Pacific Language Variation on the languages of Indonesia includes work on Indonesian, Javanese, Sasak, Acehnese, and Madurese (Ravindranath et al., 2021); these studies illustrate the rich data that may be gathered in this setting on subjects including variation in politeness registers and the outcomes of language contact. Turning to research on Mandarin, studies in Maritime Southeast Asia have explored the relationship between local varieties and external norms, from both usage and attitudinal perspectives (Chong & Tan, 2013; Starr 2022). Recent work on endangered languages of the region, such as Baba Malay, has contributed to our understanding of how sociolinguistic variation functions in languages with limited intergenerational transmission (Lee, 2022). In addition to research on community-based variation and change, research in the third wave variationist tradition, which shifts the focus of inquiry to style and performance of identity, has begun to examine how semiotic resources are juxtaposed in the construction of certain personae. Chong’s (2020) analysis of the social media profiles of young Singaporeans, for example, focuses on variants of the ‘xiao mei mei’ (‘younger sister’) characterological figure. As this work 244
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demonstrates, non-local features, such as slang terms from African American English, are increasingly being combined with local features to construct new, distinctive youth styles. Studies in this tradition underscore that, while globalization does bring non-local elements into local language use, these features may be deployed in transformative ways that do not necessarily result in assimilation to a homogeneous, globalized norm.
Conclusion This overview has considered how researchers have approached the sociolinguistic situation in Maritime Southeast Asia from a variety of perspectives. Due to the sheer scale of linguistic and social diversity in the region, the wide variety of studies noted in the preceding sections have merely begun to illuminate aspects of the sociolinguistic phenomena in this part of the world. Even in communities that have been subject to extensive academic study for many decades, such as Singapore, notable gaps remain in the literature. Variation and change in local varieties of Tamil, for example, have yet to be systematically investigated. As the field continues to develop in the region, experimental methodologies, such as eye-tracking, might be used to investigate how members of these diverse communities make use of sociolinguistic information as they navigate their local sociolinguistic landscapes. Further research might also be carried out regarding how particular local styles or characterological figures are enregistered and semiotically constructed.
Note 1 For the purposes of the present chapter, Malaysia will be classified as part of Maritime Southeast Asia, although its territories span both the Malay Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula.
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Sociolinguistics in Maritime Southeast Asia Setyabudi, T. (2017). Language policy in Indonesia. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on science, technology, and humanity (pp. 157–168). Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta. Sharwabi, S. (2022). The Americanisation of English in Brunei. World Englishes, 1–17. https://doi. org/10.1111/weng.12577. Singapore Department of Statistics. (2021). Singapore census of population 2020. www.singstat.gov.sg/ publications/reference/cop2020/cop2020-sr1 Smith-Hefner, N. (2009). Language shift, gender, and ideologies of modernity in Central Java, Indonesia. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 19(1), 57–77. Sneddon, J. N. (2003). The Indonesian language: Its history and role in modern society. UNSW Press. Starr, R. L. (2019). Cross-dialectal awareness and use of the BATH-TRAP distinction in Singapore: Investigating the effects of overseas travel and media consumption. Journal of English Linguistics, 47(1), 55–88. Starr, R. L. (2021). Changing language, changing character types. In L. Hall-Lew, E. Moore, & R. J. Podesva (Eds.), Social meaning and variation: Theorizing the third wave (pp. 315–337). Cambridge University Press. Starr, R. L. (2022). Acquisition and perception of Mandarin Chinese variation among children in Singapore. In R. Bayley, X. Li, & D. Preston (Eds.), Variation in second and heritage languages (pp. 43–70). John Benjamins. Starr, R. L., & Hiramoto, M. (2019). Inclusion, exclusion, and racial identity in Singapore’s language education system. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 29(3), 341–355. Starr, R. L., & Kapoor, S. (2020). “Our graduates will have the edge”: Linguistic entrepreneurship and the discourse of Mandarin enrichment centers in Singapore. Multilingua, 40(2), 155–174. Stenberg, J. (2015). Multilingualism and the West Kalimantan Hakka. In L. Wei (Ed.), Multilingualism in the Chinese diaspora worldwide: Transnational connections and local social realities (pp. 123–140). Routledge. Tan, Y.-Y. (2016). The Americanization of the phonology of Asian Englishes: Evidence from Singapore. In G. Leitner, A. Hashim, & H. Wolf (Eds.), Communicating with Asia: The future of English as a global language (pp. 120–134). Cambridge University Press. Taylor-Leech, K. (2019). Postcolonial language-in-education policy in globalised times: The case of TimorLeste. In A. Kirkpatrick & A. J. Liddicoat (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of language education policy in Asia (pp. 298–311). Routledge. Ting, S. H., & Sussex, R. (2002). Language choice among the Foochows in Sarawak, Malaysia. Multilingua, 21, 1–15. Wang, T. (2019). Family language policy and sibling varation among bilingual Chinese Singaporeans [PhD dissertation, Singapore, National University of Singapore]. Wee, L. (2003). Linguistic instrumentalism in Singapore. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 24, 211–24. Wong, K., & Tan, Y. (2017). Being Chinese in a global context: Linguistic constructions of Chinese ethnicity. Global Chinese, 3(1), 1–23. Wong, V. (2018). The language medium policies: A study on the development of independent Chinese secondary schools (ICSS) in Malaysia. KATHA – The Official Journal of the Centre for Civilisational Dialogue, 13(1), 32–53. Young, C., & Igcalinos, T. (2019). Language-in-education policy development in the Philippines. In A. Kirkpatrick & A. J. Liddicoat (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of language education policy in Asia (pp. 165–184). Routledge. Zen, E., & Starr, R. L. (2021). Variation and contact-induced change in Javanese phonology among multilingual children in Indonesia. Asia-Pacific Language Variation, 7(2), 95–119.
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20 SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH INTO TURKIC LANGUAGES Turkey, Northern Cyprus and Turkic states in Central Asia Yasemin Bayyurt and Işıl Erduyan Introduction Sociolinguistic research in Turkey has followed a trajectory similar to some of the other areas represented in this volume (e.g., East Central Europe). Modern linguistics entered Turkish academia in the 1950s, and much of the earlier work on Turkish focused on the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of the language. Ranging from prosodic features of Turkish to topics such as semantic extension, computational linguistics, idiomatic language use, politeness in spoken discourse or purification of Turkish language (e.g., Baş, 2021; Bayyurt, 2000; Can & Ercan, 2020; Çelebi, 2015; Dehkharghani et al., 2016; Mutlu et al., 2019; Özçelik, 2014; Özçelik et al., 2021; Taylan & Rona, 2011), this attention to the structural aspects of the language continues to date. Meanwhile, sociolinguistics as a field of study was only named in various publications starting in the 1980s (e.g., İmer, 1980). Today, the field is still characterized by sporadic research interests and groups across a number of academic departments and programs in various universities. As such, one can find scholars producing sociolinguistic research predominantly based in departments of linguistics, language education, language and literature, and translation and interpretation and concentrating not only on English or Turkish, but other foreign languages, as well. However, research particularly in the framework of the sociology of language is located in less relevant fields such as political science (e.g., Aytürk, 2004) or sociology (e.g., Ertuğrul-Apaydın, 2005), too. Therefore, it is hard to claim that the range of work produced by scholars in the context of Turkey reflects the genealogy of sociolinguistics in the US or Europe (cf. Eckert, 2012). To exemplify, the social turn in second language acquisition (SLA) (Block, 2003) that has opened the door to sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological perspectives in the study of learning and using additional languages has been hardly embraced as a paradigm shift in Turkish sociolinguistic research to date. Rather, repercussions of the social turn have been partially incorporated in related fields such as English Language Teaching as in the case of incorporating translingualism, focusing on new spaces of language use such as digital linguistic practices, or adopting English as a Lingua Franca perspective. Likewise, the critical turn in applied linguistics research (Pennycook, 2001) has been only slightly translated into sociolinguistic work based in Turkey. DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-23 248
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Although sporadic, recent expansion of the field and a growing body of work by a new generation of scholars based in Turkey and abroad point to newly flourishing research avenues in Turkish sociolinguistic research. In reviewing this work, we focus on three geographical areas where Turkish is spoken predominantly, namely, mainland Turkey, Northern Cyprus and Turkic states in central Asia; and also, contexts outside Turkey where Turkish is spoken as an immigrant language. We start with briefly presenting the current sociolinguistic profile of these areas, and move onto focusing on the Turkish language reform that is one of the most critical language planning examples in the world. We then move onto summarizing the current day sociolinguistic studies in these geographical areas starting with Turkey and moving to the other Turkish speaking contexts next.
The sociolinguistic profile of Turkey: a focus on a multilingual geography Present-day Turkey is the modern extension of the most wide-reaching Turkish Empire, the Ottomans, that reigned over six centuries in a densely multicultural, multilingual geography across the European, Asian and African continents. Located at the intersection of the Black Sea to the North, the Aegean to the West and the Mediterranean to the South, Turkey borders Greece and Bulgaria to the Northwest, Armenia and Georgia to the Northeast, Iran and Iraq to the East and Southeast and Syria to the South. As in the case of every former empire turning into a modern nation state, the Turkish Republic inherited a diversity of populations and is known to be home to 42 indigenous ethnic groups today, speaking a multitude of languages and dialects (Yağmur, 2001). One third of the indigenous languages spoken in Turkey are Turkic in origin, while the rest belong to various other language families.1 The percentage of non-Turkish speaking people does not exceed 10–15 percent of the whole population (approximately 85 million). Turkish, meanwhile, is the official language of the Turkish Republic and the most commonly spoken, culturally and politically strongest variety of the Turkic family.2 The majority of native speakers of Turkish lives in Turkey and North Cyprus, while speakers of other Turkic varieties live across central Asian countries and across the countries on the eastern border of Turkey in pockets. Beyond the Turkish border to the West, there are smaller groups of Turkish speaking people as well, such as in Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of North Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and other parts of Europe. Turkish is also spoken as a native language by several millions of immigrants in Europe and beyond (see Backus, 2013 for a review).
The Turkish language reform Longtime nomads who only settled in Anatolia in the early 11th century with the Seljuk Empire, Turks spoke Turkish that was already in contact with Persian and Arabic, and the state adopted the Arabic alphabet in replacement of the Uyghur alphabet that they had been using before converting to Islam (Clauson, 2002). At that time in Anatolia, which was partially under Byzantine rule, an Anatolian version of Greek was spoken. Besides Greek, Armenian and other local languages were spoken in various regions by a diversity of populations. After the conquest of İstanbul and the end of the Byzantine rule, the multi-ethnic, multinational Ottoman Empire ruled for more than six centuries. What is known today as Ottoman Turkish was the language of the court and the elite that was accessible to a small group of Turkish and non-Turkish Ottomans. Mostly Turkish in syntax, Ottoman Turkish borrowed a large vocabulary from both Arabic and Persian. As a highly centralized Empire, the Ottomans gave primacy to İstanbul in terms of mobilizing the inhabitants through education while the Ottoman community in Anatolia had a much lower literacy rate. While non-Muslim minorities had their own schools across the empire (Fortna, 2010), the majority of the Turkish community were rural and poor and lacked access to schools (Akıncı & Bayyurt, 2003; Doğançay-Aktuna, 1995, 2004). 249
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Ottoman modernization started in the 18th century, but critical reforms in education and language planning were put into force during the Tanzimat (Restoration) period in the middle of the 19th century. As part of the reform, a critical stance towards the Ottoman language developed among the modernist elite and they held two opposing views in terms of modernizing the language: to modify the Arabic-based Ottoman alphabet, or to adopt the Latin alphabet altogether. In reality, the Latin alphabet had been in use for a long time due to diplomatic relations with western European countries. For instance, the first telegram from İstanbul to Italy was sent in 1855. Besides, the Latin alphabet was already in use in some Turkish and non-Turkish newspapers printed in İstanbul. Against this background, Turkey went through a massive language reform following its foundation as a modern nation state in 1923. The Turkish Language Reform (henceforth TLR) is one of the most significant language reform movements in the world in terms of its planning, execution in a short time, and massive effect across the country (König, 2004). The reform was officially put into practice on November 1, 1928, with the Turkish Grand National Assembly passing the Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet (number 13533). The use of the new alphabet was made obligatory on December 1, 1928, for print media, and January 1, 1929, for administrative offices and affairs of state. In two months’ time, the Arabic alphabet had become a thing of the past. The TLR has two dimensions: the script reform through which the Arabic-based phonetic alphabet was latinized and a 29-letter Turkish alphabet was accepted; and the purification of lexicon and grammar from the influence of Arabic and Persian (Levend, 1972). In 1932, a national language association, the Türk Dil Kurumu (Turkish Language Association) (henceforth TDK4) was initiated with the major task of ‘Turkifying’ the language by proposing Turkish equivalents of foreign words, structures and lexical items and to carry out scholarly work. As many researchers have argued (e.g., Brendemoen, 1998; Schlyter, 2005), the TLR served Turkish nation building and Western-style modernization (Doğançay-Aktuna, 2004) in an effort to “break the ties with the Islamic East and to facilitate communication domestically as well as with the Western World” (Lewis, 1999, p. 27). In addition, the reform also aimed at facilitating education in standard Turkish among non-Turkish-speaking minorities. The TDK promoted standardization and codification of modern Turkish language via publications, including dictionaries, spelling guides, modern literary texts and academic publications. However, the success of the TLR is the result of extremely authoritarian methods and tacit approval of the population due to low literacy rate. In many parts of Turkey, schools were opened for the first time, and they started education in Turkish taught in Latin alphabet and using coursebooks written in the standard, purified variety. The TLR is a good example of a state-sponsored language planning endeavor in a newly founded nation state. To follow the components of language reform as proposed by Heine (1967) and Kloss (1969), the status planning of Turkish as an official language assured the more powerful status of Turkish over the other languages spoken in the country and the Ottoman Turkish that was considered the prestige variety in the Ottoman times. The TLR also undertook corpus planning in terms of constructing new dictionaries, creating and compiling corpora of “pure-Turkish” words and putting them into circulation across the country. In terms of acquisition planning, the whole curricula were rewritten in the new alphabet and modern Turkish was included in the teacher education programs as much as curriculum and instruction. Labeled as a “catastrophic success” by Lewis (1999), the TLR reform has been debated for a long time among scholars. In recent years, scholars from non-linguistic disciplines have started critical discussions on the topic and evaluated the TLR in the context of the Turkish nation-building process (Aslan, 2007; Aytürk, 2004; Çolak, 2004). Although the reform itself is a large-scale sociolinguistic phenomenon, sociolinguistics as a discipline still falls short in terms of discussing it in Turkey (see Bayyurt, 2013). 250
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Sociolinguistic studies of Turkish and other Turkic languages It would not be wrong to argue that most of the sociolinguistically oriented research in Turkey is conducted in language education departments and, therefore, the focus stays more frequently on language use in educational settings or language pedagogies deriving from sociolinguistic realities. In two scope reviews published seven years apart, both Alptekin and Tatar (2011) and Aydınlı and Ortaçtepe (2018) found that applied linguistic research published in local journals within the last two decades are predominantly oriented towards pedagogical focus and much less on conceptual development, and furthermore, the focus stays predominantly on EFL (English as a foreign language) learning and teaching. While it is true that applied linguistics in Turkey is heavily dominated by ELT (English language teaching) research, one can also see the impact of a sociolinguistic perspective in this field in recent years. Advocating a deconstruction in the field of ELT in Turkey, Bayyurt (2013) draws attention to classrooms being conceptualized as spaces for communities of practice and thus the relevance of sociolinguistics for ELT studies in Turkey. To this end, particularly since the 2016 reform in Turkish higher education that mandated a curriculum revision in pre-service teacher education programs proposing a special strand of elective courses including sociolinguistics, there has been a growing body of work concentrating on sociolinguistic problems in ELT in Turkey. In the first place, English as a lingua franca awareness in ELT gained momentum with particular focus on the role of materials and teacher perspectives (e.g., Bayyurt & Altınmakas, 2012; Bayyurt et al., 2019; Guerra et al., 2022). As sociolinguistic and methodological expansion of World Englishes (WEs) and EFL research, English-medium instruction (e.g., İnal et al., 2021; Karakaş & Bayyurt, 2019), teacher identity (e.g., Kaçar & Bayyurt, 2018; Selvi et al., 2022) have become new fields of interest with sociolinguistic sensibilities. One of the most compelling points about this body of work is the expanding research methodologies (e.g., telecollaboration) as much as research contexts that extend far beyond the ELT classrooms in Turkey to explore the recent developments in the field such as the development of teachers’ and learners’ understanding of intercultural citizenship and their realization of belonging to a global community of English language speakers, and/or studies on study abroad/foreign exchange programs in Europe and other parts of the world (See Çiftçi et al., 2020; Gezer & Dixon, 2021). Likewise, sociolinguistic issues such as gender have been studied in the framework of ELT materials (e.g., Bağ & Bayyurt, 2015; Selvi & Kocaman, 2021). Further pedagogical orientation in conceptualizing language as a social capacity comes from the emerging body of work by Sert (2015). While based mainly on classroom discourse research, research in this line has made a significant entry into Turkish applied linguistics by solely focusing on a Conversation Analytic perspective. Along the same lines, problematizing World Englishes in the Turkish context (Bayyurt, 2012; Selvi, 2011; Kızıltepe & Doğançay-Aktuna, 2005) has been studied for a long while. Another ELT-based area that has been studied often is English language education policy research (e.g., Kırkgöz, 2009). Against these developments in applied linguistics, studies in Turkish sociolinguistics have stayed on a limited number of topics. One of the most popular fields of study has been discourse analysis and most of the attention in this field has been on media discourse such as TV shows (Açıkalın, 2004; Bayyurt, 2000), newspaper articles (Can & Ercan, 2020), newspaper columns (Ekici & Ercan, 2019) and news media discourse (Alagözlü et al., 2019). In recent years, new foci of interest in discourse analysis have emerged, such as everyday conversations (CA), youth language use (Özer & Can, 2020), social media language use (Erdoğan-Öztürk & Işık-Güler, 2020) and discourse markers (Çetin & Uzdu-Yıldız, 2021). Critical perspectives on discourse have also been adopted in language planning and education (Toker, 2021; Ünver-Lischewski, 2018). These studies have not only shown the incorporation of new contexts but new methodologies, such as corpus analysis, as well. In this regard, recent studies at a newly founded discourse lab at the 251
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Middle Eastern Technical University in Ankara have been providing new insights into studies in Turkish discourse.5 Since the publication of the first edition of this volume, Turkey has been going through a massive refugee crisis fueled by the Arab Spring and the political unrest in the Middle East. The increasing immigrant population is changing the sociolinguistic profile of the country rapidly, and this has now found place in sociolinguistic studies. In her doctoral dissertation based on a linguistic ethnographic study, Saygı (2019) focuses on Iraqi Turkmen women who escaped to a central Turkish town. Following the women across their social gatherings with local Turkish women, Saygı depicts the complexities involved in their linguistic identity processes at the intersection of varieties of Turkish, Iraqi and Quranic Arabic. Another linguistic ethnographic project, Contemporary Linguistic Diversity in İstanbul6 aims to reflect the central role of İstanbul as a migration hub between Europe and Asia. Theses that have so far come out of this linguistic ethnographic project each focus on a different immigrant community in İstanbul (Japanese, Ugandan, Iranian). Deniz (2021) has focused on a group of multilingual Ugandans living and working in İstanbul from a chronotopic perspective and problematized the construction of translocality. Sönmez (2021) has analyzed a group of Iranian women who have recently moved to İstanbul as lifestyle migrants and focused on their agency as a matter of their past in Iran, their present in İstanbul and their future lives. Bozer (2021) has studied a group of Japanese professionals working at the Japanese office of an English-medium university in İstanbul and depicted the multilingual everyday practices. Along the same lines, more attention has been placed on the visible multilingualism in the city through the linguistic landscape lenses (e.g., İnal et al., 2021). In addition to immigrant multilingualism, indigenous/regional multilingualism that is inherent to Turkey has been studied through sociolinguistic lenses, as well. In his interview study, Çakıroğlu (2022) studied the heritage language ideologies in relation to Armenian. Besides, sociolinguistic research has also focused on immigrant groups that moved to Turkey from the Balkans, Turkic states of Central Asia, and other parts of the World (Karahan, 2004) as well as from Northern Cyprus (Issa, 2006; Osam, 2006). These studies analyze patterns of language maintenance and shift, code-switching, code-mixing or language attrition, among other subjects. In the opposite direction of migration, Turkish has been studied as an immigrant language predominantly in Europe for almost six decades now (e.g., Bayram, 2020). Heavily oriented towards a morphosyntactic focus, Turkish as an immigrant/heritage language is now an established field of study with research showcasing various language contact situations, such as German-Turkish. Among recent work with a sociolinguistic focus, Pfaff et al. (2017) draw on the language ideology dimension of Turkish taught as a heritage language in the context of Germany, while Schröder (2003) and Küppers et al. (2014) analyze policy documents and their repercussions in schools. Erduyan’s linguistic-ethnographic work focuses on the multilingual identity construction of German-Turkish students against the background of Turkish as a HL instruction in Berlin (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022).
Language contact and varieties of Northern Cypriot Turkish and other Turkic languages Turkic languages have long been spoken in Central Asia, the Balkans and Cyprus, and these regions have been contexts for language contact long before sociolinguistics. As Schlyter (2005) indicates: The diffusion of Turkic-speaking people in and around Anatolia . . . was not, naturally enough, confined to the territory of the modern Turkish Republic. Consequently, Turkic varieties which are close to Turkish and most of which are recognized as Turkish dialects can be found beyond the Turkish borders, above all on Cyprus and in the Balkans. (p. 1905) 252
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For example, in Bulgaria, the Turkish speaking community constitutes 9–10 percent (about 800,000) of the whole population. Although there has been massive emigration and change of populations, extensive language contact continues between local people in the region and the Turkic speaking newcomers. Schlyter (2005) also notes cases of language change in southern Moldavia inhabited by the Gagauz people, an Eastern Orthodox Turkic group, who speak a variety of Turkish that is widespread in the area, influenced by contact with other languages in the region. In this sense, the variety of Northern Cypriot Turkish seems to be an extension of Anatolian Turkish. As Demir and Johanson (2006) write, the local variety/dialect spoken in Northern Cyprus today is naturally confined to the island, and its contact with external cultural centers has been rather restricted. The dialect has thus developed without a strong influence from standard Turkish. As a result, a Cypriot Turkish dialect with specific characteristic properties has emerged. (p. 1) However, Northern Cypriot Turkish went through several stages of influence from Anatolian Turkish at different intervals. For example, after 1974, Northern Cyprus experienced periods of intensive language contact as a result of immigration and an influx of university students. This caused standard Turkish, Anatolian dialects and Northern Cypriot Turkish dialects to come into closer contact with one another (see Osam & Ağazade, 2004; Osam & Kelepir, 2006; Vanci-Osam, 2006). In the studies that followed the first edition of this chapter (Bayyurt, 2010), more research on Cypriot Turkish and Turkish as a second language has been conducted from the perspectives of language contact, identity, second language use/learning of Cypriot Turkish and attitudes towards Cypriot Turkish dialects (e.g., Gulle, 2011; Issa, 2006; Mavromati & Papapavlou, 2014; Papadopoulou et al., 2011; Sakallı & Kunt, 2021; Sakhatova, 2019; Tum et al., 2016; Tum & Kunt, 2021). In these recent studies on Cypriot Turkish, the focus is more on profiling the characteristics of the Turkish language variety spoken in North Cyprus and emerging issues of multilingualism and multiculturalism on the island due to the increase in the number of international students attending universities in Northern Cyprus and the opening policy of the Turkish and Greek Cypriot governments. Hence, there is more interaction between Turkish and Greek people living on the island, and between these communities and the international people coming to the island for study and work purposes. Varieties of Turkic languages that are spoken in and around Asian and European contexts may or may not be mutually intelligible.7 It is also important to note that the Turkic populations in the Central Asian and other Asian contexts were part of former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (e.g., Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and others). Therefore, as one goes further East, Turkic languages become less intelligible. For example, Turkish and Azeri are more mutually intelligible than Turkish and Uyghur. Besides, Turkic languages do not share important common features, such as a common script; while, for example, Kazakhs use the Cyrillic alphabet, Uyghurs use the Arabic script. Besides studies on scripts of Turkic languages in Central Asian contexts, there is massive research on loanwords, revitalization of endangered Turkic languages, Turkic identity and language contact as well as studies that are more linguistically oriented in Asian and Central Asian contexts. However, these studies focus mostly on linguistic aspects of Turkic languages, such as phonology, semantics and syntax (e.g., Baş, 2021; Gribanova, 2013; Tambovtsev, 2001; Turaeva, 2015; Yakup & Sereno, 2016), as well as sign languages (e.g., Arık, 2013, 2016), loanwords and lexicon (e.g., Li, 2016; Róna-Tas & Berta, 2011; Şahin, 2011). Sociolinguistic research in this context in recent years has mainly focused on language policies (e.g., Ayten & Atanasoska, 2020), language contact (e.g., Khabtagaeva, 2006), language endangerment (e.g., Dryga, 2017; Korkmaz & Doğan, 2017; Van Pareren, 2011), identity (e.g., Lee, 2016) and code-switching (e.g., Issa, 2006). 253
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Conclusion Although it has been more than a decade since the publication of the earlier version of this chapter, there are still unexplored areas of sociolinguistics research on Turkish and Turkic languages – e.g., dialect variation, language contact, language maintenance and shift, language and gender, language and identity, and language change besides newly emerging ones like Turkish as an immigrant language, linguistic landscape research and limited but newly emerging research areas. As we have discussed, applied linguistics research in Turkey is still predominantly pedagogy oriented and/or the conceptual development in this field is still influenced by the cognitivist paradigm. Although one can see the emerging areas of research in sociolinguistics, there seems to be a need for a more comprehensive reconceptualization of the field in Turkey. As documented earlier, Turkic languages, Turkish as spoken in North Cyprus and other parts of the world also need to be approached through the contemporary multilingualism paradigms in sociolinguistics. With more sociolinguistic research today, links between modern Turkish language and other varieties of Turkic languages and how they serve an approximate degree of mutual intelligibility seem to be promising fields of study. To this end, Turkish spoken as a native language across the globe through contemporary migration movements is an important Turkish sociolinguistics topic today. Likewise, questions about the future of the Turkish language in a global world have yet to be answered. Turkish is changing just like any other language, and this sociolinguistic reality will always require a more nuanced understanding of the various contexts and conditions that Turkish and Turkic languages are studied in.
Notes 1 In her report on languages spoken in Turkey, Schlyter (2005, p. 1903) notes, “Besides standard Turkish and its dialects, there are spoken varieties of Azerbaijan, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek, Kirghiz, Kazakh, Crimean and Kazan Tatar, Bashkir, Noghay, Karachay-Balkar and Kumuk. Other language families represented in Turkey are Indo-European (Kurdish dialects – mainly Kurmanji but also Zaza – Ossetic, Armenian, Greek, Albanian, Polish, Russian, German, Romani, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), etc.), Finno-Ugric (Estonian), Semitic (Arabic and Neo-Aramaic dialects, Hebrew) and Caucasian languages (Georgian, Laz, Abkhaz, Circassian, Cheeneh-Ingush, etc.).” 2 A list of Turkic Languages: Turkish, Gagauz, Azerbaijanian, Turkmen, Kashkay, Kipchak, Kazakh, Karakalpak, Noghay, Kirghiz, Tatar, Bashkir, Crimean Tatar, Kumyk, Karachay, Balkar, Karaim, Uyghur: Uzbek, Uyghur, Yakut, Altay, Khakas, Tuvan, Tofa and so on (see Csató & Johanson, 2006; Karakoç & Csató, 2006). 3 Türk Harflerinin Kabul ve Tatbiki Hakkında Kanun (retrieved from www.mevzuat.adalet.gov.tr/html/463. html, on 26 October 2008). 4 www.tdk.gov.tr 5 http://discore.metu.edu.tr 6 Funded by Boğaziçi University, project code: BUSUP15561 7 See also Clauson (2002), Csató and Johanson (2006), Karakoç and Csató (2006) and Schlyter (2005) for more information about Turkic languages and linguistics.
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Sociolinguistic research into Turkic languages Alptekin, C., & Tatar, S. (2011). Research on foreign language teaching and learning in Turkey (2005–2009). Language Teaching, 44(3), 328–353. Arik, E. (Ed.). (2013). Current directions in Turkish sign language research. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Arik, E. (Ed.). (2016). Ellerle konuşmak: Türk İşaret Dili araştırmaları (To speak with the hands: Research on Turkish Sign language). Koç University Publications. Aslan, S. (2007). “Citizen, Speak Turkish!”: A nation in the making. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 13(2), 245–272. Aydınlı, J., & Ortaçtepe, D. (2018). Applied linguistics and language teaching in Turkey, 2010–2015. Language Teaching, 51(2), 210–245. Ayten, A. C., & Atanasoska, T. (2020). “Turkish is a Stepchild.” A case study of language policies in North Rhine Westphalia, Germany. Heritage Language Journal, 17(2), 156–179. Aytürk, İ. (2004). Turkish Linguists against the West: The origins of linguistic nationalism in Atatürk’s Turkey. Middle Eastern Studies, 40(6), 1–25. Backus, A. (2013). Turkish as an immigrant language in Europe. In T. K. Bhatia & W. C. Ritchie (Eds.), The handbook of bilingualism and multilingualism (2nd ed., pp. 770–790). Blackwell. Bağ, E., & Bayyurt, Y. (2015). Gender representations in EFL textbooks in Turkey. In S. Mills & A. S. Mustapha (Eds.), Gender representation in learning materials: International perspectives (pp. 64–85). Routledge. Baş, M. (2021). A corpus study of the semantic extensions of the eye in Turkish. In M. Baş & I. Kraska-Szlenk (Eds.), Embodiment in cross-linguistic studies (pp. 70–92). Brill. Bayram, F. (Ed.). (2020). Studies in Turkish as a Heritage language. John Benjamins. Bayyurt, Y. (2000). Türkçe’de ‘resmiyet’ kavramına TV sohbet programları çerçevesinden bir bakış (A look into the concept of ‘formality’ in Turkish through TV talk shows). In Z. Kulelioğlu (Ed.), Dilbilim Araştırmaları 2000 (Linguistic studies 2000) (pp. 17–37). Simurg. Bayyurt, Y. (2010). A sociolinguistic profile of Turkey, Northern Cyprus and other Turkic States in Central Asia. In M. J. Ball (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of sociolinguistics around the world (pp. 117–127). Routledge. Bayyurt, Y. (2012). Proposing a model for English language education in the Turkish socio-cultural context. In Y. Bayyurt & Y. Bektaş-Çetinkaya (Eds.), Research perspectives on teaching and learning English in Turkey: Policies and practices (pp. 301–312). Peter Lang. Bayyurt, Y. (2013). Current perspectives on sociolinguistics and English language education. The Journal of Language Teaching and Learning, 3(1), 69–78. Bayyurt, Y., & Altınmakas, D. (2012). A World Englishes course at a foundation university in Turkey. In A. Matsuda (Ed.), Teaching English as an international language: Principles and Practices (pp. 169–182). Multilingual Matters. Bayyurt, Y., Kurt, Y., Öztekin, E., Guerra, L., Cavalheiro, L., & Pereira, R. (2019). English language teachers’ awareness of English as a lingua franca in multilingual and multicultural contexts. Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 5(2), 185–202. Block, D. (2003). The social turn in second language acquisition. Edinburgh University Press. Bozer, E. M. (2021). Linguistic ethnography in a multilingual workplace: The Japanese language office at an English Medium State University in Turkey [Unpublished master’s thesis. İstanbul: Boğaziçi University]. Brendemoen, B. (1998). The Turkish language reform. In É. Á. Csató & L. Johanson (Eds.), The Turkic languages (pp. 242–247). Routledge. Çakıroğlu, U. (2022). Heritage language ideologies: Speakers’ perspectives [Unpublished master’s thesis, İstanbul: Boğaziçi University]. Can, Ö., & Ercan, G. S. (2020). Reported speech types and their discursive functions in Turkish Op-Ed articles. Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi (Journal of Linguistic Studies), 31(2), 265–288. Çelebi, H. (2015). Impoliteness in corpora: A comparative analysis of British English and Spoken Turkish. Equinox. Çetin, B., & Uzdu-Yıldız, F. (2021). Awareness of Turkish discourse markers: “İşte”. International Journal of Eurasian Education and Culture, 6(14), 2254–2289. Çiftçi, E. Y., Karaman, A. C., & Daloğlu, A. (2020). ‘No one is superior to another’: Tracing intercultural development in a year-long study abroad programme. The Language Learning Journal, 50(5), 537–549. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2020.1802770 Clauson, G. (2002). Studies in Turkic and mongolic linguistics. Routledge. Çolak, Y. (2004). Language policy and official ideology in early Republican Turkey. Middle Eastern Studies, 40(6), 67–91.
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21 SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH INTO IRANIAN LANGUAGES William O. Beeman
Introduction The Iranian language sphere consists of three currently recognized “core” varieties, and a number of peripheral varieties that diverge significantly enough to be thought of as separate “languages.” The core varieties are Standard Modern Persian,1 Dari, and Tajik. Other Iranian languages spoken in Iran are Kurdish, of which there are several varieties; Baluchi; Luri; a number of other scattered regional varieties in Northern, Central, and Southern Iran (see Izadi, 2006). Further east are found Modern Sogdian, known today as Yaghnobi, and a variety of “Eastern Iranian languages,” including Nuristani, Pashto, Pasha’i. Included in these Eastern languages are also the languages of the Pamir mountains: Shugni (Shugnani), Yazgulami, Ishkashimi, and Wahkhi. This sociolinguistic overview focuses primarily on the three core varieties just mentioned, which serve as the primary language of communication throughout the Iranian language area. Though local speakers may know a regional variety, they are nearly universally bi- or multilingual, and communicate nationally, are educated in, and identify with Persian, Dari, or Tajik. There have been informal debates among Persian language specialists concerning the status of Tajik and Dari vs. standard Modern Persian. All linguists know that speech communities utilize a continuum of varieties of speech, and that the term “language” is more a political appellation than a scientifically accurate descriptor. The range of variation in Persian, Dari, and Tajik communities is quite extensive, embodying regionalisms and borrowings from other language families. The term “register” has a special status in describing languages in that it represents a speech variety that is marked for particular specific occasions. Whereas Modern Persian and Dari are very close in form, Tajik has more divergent discourse structures. Based on fieldwork carried out in Tajikistan, I theorize that standard Persian as spoken in Iran has become a special register of Tajik marked for formal occasions such as political speech making, wedding orations, news broadcasts, and elevated scientific discourse. In this way the opposition between all the varieties of colloquial Tajik and standard Persian in Tajikistan resembles the diglossic opposition between dhimotiki and katherevusa in recent Modern Greek. In the discussion that follows, I provide several examples, and speculate on the concretization and meaning of such shifting diglossia in the use of vocal speech registers. A controlled comparison of “Persian,” “Dari,” and “Tajik” is not very productive, since there is considerable regional variation within the three varieties. It is far more productive to explore the 259
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social and cultural relationships between these language varieties, and to provide a sketch of their development in recent years. When used for self-identification purposes, speech variables can be used to identify oneself and others as belonging to a specific community, to indicate membership in a particular social class, or to reinforce one’s gender identity. When used to identify context, speech variables distinguish between literary and conversational genres. They also mark particular culturally defined situations, such as public, private, academic, legal, formal, informal, and many others. When used strategically, they can be utilized to indicate relative personal relations, such as status, formality, and intimacy. They can also be used to indicate attitudes such as humor, sarcasm, irony, subordination, superordination, admiration, flattery, and others. Variables are polysemic in the sense that they can be used to indicate more than one thing. For example, a particular variable may indicate at the same time that one is an upper-class male in a formal situation showing admiration toward one’s companions in interaction. I have documented some of these dynamics for standard Persian in other publications (Beeman, 1986, 1987).
Modern varieties of standard Iranian As will be seen later in the chapter, historical vagaries have split the Persian-speaking community of the ancient empires into the semi-distinct communities of Persian, Dari, and Tajik speakers (Beeman, 2005). I say “semi-distinct” because although these three varieties have been formalized through both academic and political processes, they remain mutually intelligible. Outside of the region, there is some confusion as to whether the varieties constitute one language with slight variations or distinct “languages.” Brian Spooner raises this question in his paper: “Are we teaching Persian? or Farsi? or Dari? or Tojiki [sic]?” (1994). Spooner’s article also highlights the curious Farsi/Persian distinction in nomenclature for the language that prevails today outside academic circles.2 What is clear is that the three varieties have diverged largely because of shifts in historical and political boundaries over many centuries. The Modern Persian that emerged during the eleventh and twelfth centuries spread throughout the great Iranian empires of the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, eventually being separated from each other during the period of European colonization, and the establishment of the nation-state system. The European political world mandated the creation of hard boundaries separating polities from each other. Frequency of communication became denser for the populations living within these new borders, and their speech varieties developed a separate character. This process was long ago noted by historical linguists, and in particular by Leonard Bloomfield in his classic (1933) work, Language, where he noted this political and social phenomenon as the reason for divisions in different varieties of Modern German.3 The broadest division in Persian is seen between Modern Iranian Persian and Tajik, as will be shown in the following section. The development of formalized modern Tajik is the result of a particular political and historical process situated through the control of the Tajik-speaking area, first, by Russia, then by the Soviet Union and, finally, under separate states in the post-Soviet period. The containment of Tajik speakers within these political boundaries brought this variety of Persian into closer interaction with Central Asian Turkic languages, notably Uzbek, and with Russian, which colored and changed this variety (cf. Atkin, 1994; Subtelny, 1994). Modern Iranian Persian was influenced by Azerbaijani Turkish through the Qajar court, and by contact with Western European languages, notably French, and in the post–World War II period by English (cf. Beeman, 1992; Meskoob, 1992). Since the basic grammatical structure of all varieties is essentially the same, Persian, Dari, and Tajik have usually been treated under one rubric, with the differences between the individual variations noted (cf. Lazard, 1970). However, in recent years with the emergence of Tajikistan as an independent state, 260
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some newer studies have focused on the Tajik variety in a comprehensive manner (Rzehak, 1999, 2001; Hillman, 2000; Baizoyev & Hayward, 2004; Ido, 2005; Perry, 2005).4 The classic sketch of Tajik grammar by Rastorgueva (1963) from the Soviet period reflects the national language ideology of the Soviet Union, in which Tajik was conceptually separated from other varieties of Persian.5 Tajik, Dari, and Persian are “languages” in the sense that they have concretized canonical forms that are transmitted through institutionalized schooling and reference works, however, as mentioned earlier, structurally they are all varieties of Persian. The history of all three varieties may be surprising to speakers of Modern Persian in Iran. In fact, Modern Persian in its literary form emerged first in Bukhara (present-day Uzbekistan) during the Samanid Empire (ninth–tenth centuries CE). The term Dari derives from the phrase Farsi-ye Dærbari, or “Court Persian.” The term also dates from the Samanid Empire, although today it refers both to the variety of Persian spoken in Afghanistan, and to the variety spoken by Zoroastrians in Yazd and Kerman in Iran (also known as Gabri). Although its speakers have been active for millennia, Tajik, with its present name and in its present written form as mentioned earlier, is a twentieth-century creation – an artifact of the Soviet Union and its cultural policies, and some divergence between the two varieties is attributable to this political process (cf. Bashiri, 1997a, 1997b). Persian, Dari and Tajik encompass the kinds of variation referred to in the previous section, and there is much overlap in particular variable features. Some speakers of “Persian” in Khorasan communicate colloquially in a variety that is virtually identical with speakers in Herat, Samarkand or Dushanbeh. If we take Persian and Tajik as antipodes on a scale of variability, with Dari as an intermediate form, we can see some important dynamic relationships between the varieties. There is a directionality in the relationship between the two varieties. Persian is seen by all speech communities as a prestige standard, and Tajik and Dari as colloquial forms. Dari, as spoken in Afghanistan, is seen as a stigmatized variety for many of its speakers when they find themselves in a primarily Persian-speaking setting. Afghan residents in Iran will often resort to using a foreign language such as English rather than speak Dari. To reinforce this notion of hierarchy, it is worth noting that speakers of Persian varieties rarely learn Tajik or Dari forms, whereas educated Tajik and Dari speakers all acquire some command of Persian forms. It is important to note that Persian, Tajik, and Dari are mutually intelligible. This is in stark contrast to their non-intelligibility with some other Iranian “languages” mentioned at the beginning of this discussion, such as Kurdish or Baluchi, and some varieties that are commonly referred to as “dialects” such as Luri, Tati, or Kashi. The Pamir “languages” of the Gorno-Badakhshan region of Tajikistan are also unintelligible to Persian/Tajik/Dari speakers, despite the fact that these varieties have borrowed large amounts of standard Persian vocabulary (Dodikhudoeva, 2004). Shugni, alternatively called Shugnani, for example, no longer maintains any numbers above 10, the higher numbers being borrowed from Persian/Tajik. Orthographic systems contribute to perceptions of intelligibility between the “languages.” Tajik is written in Cyrillic characters despite some attempts to introduce Arabic script since Tajikistan’s independence at the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989. This leads many people to believe that the languages are less mutually intelligible than they actually are. This phenomenon is not uncommon elsewhere. Hindi/Urdu and Serbian/ Croatian are examples of mutually intelligible varieties that differ primarily in their orthographic systems. The existence of literature in the languages in question also contributes to the sense of difference. The extensive literature in Persian compared to the other two contributes to its prestige. However, vernacular published literature in Tajik – particularly in twentieth-century poetry – serves to concretize the idea of Tajik as a separate language. Table 21.1 illustrates some of the differences between the formal languages discussed earlier. 261
William O. Beeman Table 21.1 Relations between Persian, Tajik, and Dari
Persian
Tajik
Dari
Orthography Literature Relative prestige
Arabic Extensive High
Cyrillic Moderate Moderate
Arabic Scant Low
©William O. Beeman 2022
Markers of Persian and Tajik There are certain linguistic variables that tend to mark Persian and Tajik. Though it is not possible to specify every difference in this brief presentation, they fall into several broad categories roughly corresponding to standard linguistic descriptive categories.
Phonology A simpler phonological structure tends to characterize varieties identified as Tajik as opposed to those identified as Persian. In theory, both varieties have the same vowel and consonant structure as described in standard Persian grammatical literature. However, Tajik in general has a tendency to centralize vowels, particularly in unstressed syllables, and in grammatical prefixes ([mi-] and [be-]) and in personal suffixes (i.e. [-æm]). The phoneme /o/ in Persian seems quite unstable in Tajik, and is frequently realized as either [u] or [ə].6 There is a tendency for the prominent /a/ in Persian varieties to be realized as [o] or [ɔ] in Tajik varieties. Some of the same tendencies are seen in Dari, but Dari is generally closer in pronunciation to standard Persian. One generalizable difference is that Dari nearly universally realizes Persian /v/ as [w].
Morphology Speakers of varieties identified as Persian generally see Tajik and Dari varieties as embodying completely recognizable, albeit occasionally archaic forms. In general, Indo-European root forms are favored over Arabic forms in Tajik and Dari varieties, although many transmitted Arabic vocabulary items are found. The third person singular pronoun /vai/ predominates over /u/ (“he, she”) in Tajik, /besyor/ over /xeili/ (“very”) and other similar preferences. Tajik differs from Persian and Dari in its increased number of Russian borrowings; and Arabic and Western European borrowings in Persian varieties add to the color of language use in Iran, but even with these different patterns of borrowing there is a high degree of overlap in the vocabulary of the three varieties.
Syntax Two very distinct constructions differentiate Tajik varieties from Persian and Dari varieties in spoken language. The first involves the question construction. Tajik uses a terminal question particle [mi], probably as a result of Sprachbund influence from Turkish varieties in the region as in the following: 1 šəmo zæn dorid mi? “Do you have a wife?” Persian and Dari varieties would eliminate the question particle.7 262
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The second involves the use of the verb istadæn “to stand” in many Tajik constructions foreign to Persian varieties. In particular, with the truncated infinitive in Tajik progressive verb constructions where daštæn with the present tense would be used in Persian constructions. There are both literary and colloquial constructions, and even further regional variations on these colloquial constructions. In the examples in Table 21.2, one widely used set of colloquial forms is provided. Finally, there is an unusual use of a gerund construction with the suffix [-gi] in Tajik conditional constructions that rarely if ever occurs in Persian constructions where conditional forms collapse with normal indicative forms, see Table 21.3.8 It should be noted that the past participle with the [-gi] suffix is widely used as a kind of impersonal construction in Tajik forms. 2 Vai ketobo xondægi, ræft. “Having read, he left.” Note that in the preceding, the translation of the tense of the first clause depends on the tense of the verb. Viz.: 3 Vai ketobo xondægi, miravæd. “Reading the book, he goes.” Colloquially, this construction is also used as a simple past tense: 4 Shoma ketobo xondægi? “Did you read the book?” This [-gi] construction is seen in Persian forms, but is fully nominalized in most cases (e.g. zendegi “living, life”), having presumably lost its function in verb constructions.
Table 21.2 “We are eating” in Tajik and Persian English
Tajik
Persian
We are eating (now) We were eating
Mo xorda istadæ-im (lit.) Mo istadæ-im xur (colloq.) Mo xorda istadæ budim (lit.) Mo xorda istadæ budæ-im
Ma darim mixorim Ma daštim mixordim
We had been eating
Ma daštim mixordim
©William O. Beeman 2022
Table 21.3 “We would eat,” etc. in Tajik and Persian constructions English
Tajik
Persian
We would eat
Mo mikhordagistim (lit.) Mo mikhordagim (colloq.) Mo xorda istadægistim (lit.) Mo xorda istadægim (colloq.) Mo xordagistim (lit.) Mo xordagim (colloq.) Mo khorda istadægi budæ-im
Ma mixorim
We would be eating We would have eaten We would have been eating ©William O. Beeman 2022
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Ma mixordim Ma daštim mixordim Ma daštim mixordim
William O. Beeman
Contexts for Persian in Tajik: shifting diglossia Looking at the previous section, we can see that the primary areas where differences in Tajik and Persian varieties exist is in phonology and syntax. Morphology seems not to be a dimension of particular attention for speakers who possess both varieties. It is first important to understand that virtually all speakers of Tajik are bilingual (Russian and Tajik) and many are trilingual (Russian, Uzbek or Kyrgyz, and Tajik). Thus, Tajik usage is already embedded in a framework of variety choice that is quite complex, and it is shifting in the post-Soviet period. The government of Tajikistan has tended to emphasize the use of Tajik as a national identity marker, and increasingly that is how it is treated by speakers as well. Thus, in the first instance, the choice to speak Tajik is already an expression of social and cultural identity (cf. Schoeberlein-Engel, 1994; Aminov et al., 2010). Beyond this lies the choice of what variety and style of Tajik to adopt for a given situation. This “shifting diglossia” is not only normative, but also dynamic over time, as will be seen later. Given that Tajik speakers all acquire some command of Persian forms, it is important to note where and under what conditions the tendency to use these different varieties of Persian is exercised. In general, the Tajik situation tends toward diglossia as described by Ferguson (1959) in his classic article of the same title. This resembles the opposition between dhimotiki and katherevousa in recent Modern Greek. Tajik speakers will demonstrate pronunciation and syntactic structures that tend toward formal Persian in literature, and in formal, public situations. They will tend toward Tajik constructions in face-to-face conversation and in informal, private situations, as discussed later. Curiously, and perhaps because the two varieties are so very close, Dari speakers do not generally command standard Persian pronunciation or intonation in spoken forms. Written Dari approximates standard literary Persian. However, it should be noted that Dari speakers also find their use of language embedded in a situation of multi-lingual choice, with Pashto, Uzbek, Baluchi, Pasha’i and a multitude of smaller varieties competing as primary forms of communication. Literary usages in Tajik and Dari include journalistic writing, official government documents as well as some fiction, academic writing, non-fiction and poetry that emulates classic styles. Poetry in particular forms a touchstone for speakers of all varieties that keeps the most formal variety in this diglossic situation alive and active. Virtually every individual in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan above the age of six knows at least a few lines of classical Persian poetry in standard Persian, complete with its pronunciation norms. Formal usages include political speeches, public addresses, and formal social occasions, such as weddings. Toasting at banquets can also involve highly Persianized speech, especially on the part of the “toastmaster” who must introduce each individual making a toast. It must also be noted that individuals wishing to appear erudite to others will adopt Persianized forms in their speech, at times to absurd degrees, indulging in a kind of hypercorrection (cf. Labov, 1972) that can create an effect precisely opposite to that which they aspire. In Tajikistan, Tajik forms dominate in personal contact situations. An individual using formal Persian elements in everyday speech risks alienating his or her intimate friends. A few of my Tajik friends studied in Tehran, and having learned standard urban Iranian Persian are seen as somewhat pretentious when they use elements of this variety in everyday conversation in Dushanbeh. Having myself learned Persian in Iran, I have been told by my Tajik friends, “I don’t speak Iranian,” even as we are carrying out a perfectly normal, mutually comprehensible conversation. Likewise, people have listened to me speak, and then commented on the “beauty” of my language, just because I am speaking a predominantly Iranized form of Persian, which “reads” for the hearers as the formal 264
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register of their own speech. This for me clearly marks a cognitive recognition of a formal standard for Tajik speakers. Colloquialized Tajik forms are used not only in conversation, but also in playwriting and colloquial literature as well as in comic strips, the most popular forms of journalism, and the lyrics of popular songs. However, it must be recognized that the divergence of formal Persian registers from colloquial speech can be very great. Television is an important form of information and entertainment for most citizens in Tajikistan, but many rely on news broadcasts in Russian because they cannot understand the formal Persian register of the Tajik news broadcasts. President Emomali Rakhmon (formerly known as Rakhmonov) is actually quite a skilled political speaker (in my opinion) because he manages to use a variety of speech in his public addresses that hits a medium between the use of Tajik and formal Persian forms. Other varieties of Tajik are found in Uzbekistan, notably in Samarqand, Bukhara, and the Boysun locality in the Surkhandarya region of the country. Unfortunately for Tajik speakers, the government of Uzbekistan is engaged in a systematic eradication of the language by closing schools, university faculties, publications, and media outlets. The Bukhara, Samarqand, and Boysun varieties of Tajik differ from each other in pronunciation and in some morphological respects, however, historically, the people of these regions all had knowledge of classical Persian to serve as a touchstone for the mutual interpretation of these regional differences. In a field trip to these regions in 2003, I discovered that the speech of young people, who have lost access to formal Persian/Tajik instruction in schools, and exposure to the language in the media, was becoming unintelligible to Tajik speakers outside of their own region. As Tajikistan becomes more accessible to scholars, it is clear that much more research needs to be undertaken on the interrelationship between Tajik and Persian varieties of speech. The historical and genetic relationships are in need of clarification and further investigation. Since there is relatively little in terms of formal structure separating the two varieties, most of the differences lie in the social realm. I hope that this small preliminary set of observations will start scholars thinking about the sociolinguistic dimensions of the relationship between the two speech communities.
Tæ’arof: discourse marking of status and politeness Persian, Dari, and Tajik all embody an important pragmatic practice – the marking of relative status in speech. This is a component both of formality and politeness, and is routinely practiced by all competent speakers of the language. Tæ’arof is a subject of great fascination for all students of Iranian culture. It has engendered a large literature (Beeman, 1986, 1987, 1992, 2001, 2020; Izadi, 2015, 2016, 2019; Moosavi, 1986; Pourmohammadi, 2018; Taleghani-Nikzam, 1999). Tæ’arof has two aspects: linguistic and behavioral. In linguistic tæ’arof, substitutions are made for common verbs, pronouns and forms of address to indicate “other raising” and “self-lowering” in polite discourse. Thus the verb “to say” has the neutral form: goftæn, the other-raising form, færmudæn (literally, “to command”) and the selflowering form ‘ærz kærdæn (literally, “to petition”). There are a number of other-raising secondperson singular pronouns varying in degrees of politeness starting with shoma (the 2nd person plural form), and proceeding to jenab-e ali (“your honor”) and advancing to even more elevated epithets. The neutral first-person pronoun is mæn, and a common self-lowering form is bændeh (“slave”). The contrast can be seen in Table 21.4. 265
William O. Beeman Table 21.4 Lowering and raising pronouns Self-lowering (first person) Speak Give
Other raising (second person) Bændeh ‘ærz mikonam Bændeh tæqdim mikonam
Jenāb-e -ali mifarmayid Jenāb-e -ali lotf mikonid
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The variations in these verbal formulas are extensive, and they are part of the repertoire of all competent speakers of Persian, Dari, and Tajik.9 Behavioral tæ’arof involves a large body of social actions in which individuals strive to place themselves in an inferior social position vis-à-vis others in social interaction. These actions include insisting that others proceed through doors or into public spaces, deferring to others in receiving food or other gifts, adopting modest bodily attitudes in the presence of others and many other similar actions. I have described this elsewhere (Beeman, 1986) as “getting the lower hand.” Adopting behavioral tæ’arof provides many social advantages for individuals, since it places an obligation on others to act with magnanimity, both providing benefits for the person exhibiting tæ’arof, and also excusing shortcomings (see also Sharifian, 2005).
Conclusion: self-identification, context identification, and strategic action In this chapter, I have tried to give a sense of the development of shifting diglossia in the three main varieties of Persian as they have developed historically in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. The varieties are mutually intelligible, but because they have diverged over time, and through historical circumstance, the differences between them have come to have more than linguistic significance. Differences in language variety choice, as we would expect from standard sociolinguistic research, have come to provide the means for identity solidarity within the various communities. As Gregory Bateson once noted: “One of the ways a Frenchman indicates that he is French is by speaking French” (Bateson, 2000, p. 9). The first broad self-identification mechanism for people of the region is to speak Persian, Dari, or Tajik as opposed to some other language, like Russian, Uzbek, or Pashto. The second is to speak a regional variety with its characteristic pronunciation and word usage. Since the varieties of Persian also embody formal and informal registers that exist as antipodes on a gradated scale, one can mark social situations and events through the use of linguistic choice within the framework of phonological, morphological, and syntactic variations available. One can abandon features that mark informal spoken Tajik in favor of the more standard Persian forms in more formal situations, and retain them in more colloquial intimate situations. Finally, one can mark formality, status, and increase politeness through the use of pragmatic word choice in the rituals of tæ’arof. As mentioned earlier, complex speech events such as weddings and political meetings are good places to observe a variety of these markings existing side by side as individuals move between public and private interaction modes. Finally, because these choices exist, they can be used strategically for rhetorical purposes. Former president Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan always had to choose between Dari and some other language (usually Pasto, or English) in his public appearances. Further, he had to choose a level of formality when he did speak Dari. President Rakhmon (formerly known as Rakhmonov) of Tajikistan had evolved a highly studied rhetorical strategy in his use of Tajik in public settings, adjusting his speech by topic and context between a formal and an informal standard. 266
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Thus, the linguistic landscape throughout the region mirrors the complexity of the social and historical landscape. It is difficult to predict the future development of Persian, Dari, and Tajik, but the realignment of political boundaries and alliances throughout the region will have an important effect on the development of all of these languages. One interesting development is already taking place in the writing system of all these nations as a result of computerized communication. All previous official schemes to Romanize Persian script has failed, however hundreds of thousands of email messages are being written in Romanized Persian, Tajik, and Dari. There is no standard – in some ways every writer devises their own scheme – but in time conventions will develop, and there will be a common Romanized script.
Notes 1 The widely, but incorrectly used term Farsi is the name of the language in Persian, the correct English name for the language. Farsi is analogous to Deutsch for German, Français for French, or Russki for Russian. 2 See note 1. 3 The different varieties of Persian discussed in this chapter are, in my estimation, no more widely separated in form or intelligibility than the numerous varieties of Modern German. 4 Baizoyev and Hayward (2004) and Hillman’s (2000) work as well as Rzehak (1999) are oriented to teaching Tajik. Ido and Perry have provided comprehensive descriptions of Tajik. Rzehak has provided not only a description of Tajik, but also a historical sketch of the gradual diversion of the varieties. 5 There are numerous works describing the grammar and structure of Modern Iranian Persian. A review of these is beyond the scope of this discussion. 6 Rastorgueva describes this phenomenon extensively (1963, p. 4). 7 Note, however, that the [-mi] particle is eliminated if the initial question particle/oyo/ is used in Tajik constructions. In the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan, Tajik varieties take precedence over Dari in many areas. 8 Cf. Rastorgueva (1963, pp. 76–77) for a more complete analysis. 9 See Beeman (1986) and Sprachman (2002) for many more examples, and Asdjodi (2001) for a comparison with Chinese.
References Aminov, K., Jensen, V., Juraev, S., Overland, I., Tyan, D., & Uulu, Y. (2010). Language use and language policy in Central Asia. Central Asia Regional Data Review, 2(1), 1–29. Asdjodi, M. (2001). A comparison between Ta’arof in Persian and Limao in Chinese. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 148, 71–92. Atkin, M. (1994). Tajiks and the Persian world. In B. Manz (Ed.), Central Asia in historical perspective (pp. 127–143). Westview Press. Baizoyev, A., & Hayward, J. (2004). A beginner’s guide to Tajiki. Routledge. Bashiri, I. (1997a). The languages of Tajikistan in perspective. www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/Tajling/ Tajling.html Bashiri, I. (1997b). Samanid renaissance and establishment of Tajik identity. www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/ Samanid/Samanid.html Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press. Beeman, W. O. (1986). Language, status and power in Iran. Indiana University Press. Beeman, W. O. (1987). Affectivity in Persian language usage. In B. Good, M. J. Good, and M. M. J. Fischer, eds. Affect and healing in Middle Eastern cultures, Special Issue, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 11, 403–424. Beeman, W. O. (1992). Review of Meskoob, Shahrokh, Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language (John Perry’s edition; Michael J. Hillmann’s Tr). Iranian-Studies, 28, 86–88. Beeman, W. O. (2001). Emotion and sincerity in Persian discourse: Accomplishing the representation of inner states. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 148, 31–57.
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William O. Beeman Beeman, W. O. (2005). Persian, Dari and Tajik in Central Asia. NCEEER national council for Eurasian and East European research papers. NCEEER. www.nceeer.org/papers/211-persian-dari-and-tajik-in-centralasia.html Beeman, W. O. (2020). Ta’ārof: Pragmatic Key to Iranian Social Behavior. In J.-O. Östman & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics (pp. 203–224). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. H. Holt and Company. Dodikhudoeva, L. (2004). The Tajik language and the socio-linguistic situation in the mountainous Badakhshan. Iran & the Caucasus, 8(2), 281–288. Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15, 325–340. Hillman, M. C. (2000). Tajiki textbook and reader. Dunwoody Press. Ido, S. (2005). Tajik. Lincom Europa. Izadi, Ahmad, 2015. Persian honorifics and Im/Politeness as social practice. Journal of Pragmatics, 85, 81–91. Izadi, Ahmad, 2016. Over-politeness in Persian professional interactions. Journal of Pragmatics, 102, 13–23. Izadi, Ahmad, 2019. An investigation of face in Taarof. Journal of Researches in Linguistics, 10(2), 67–82. Izadi, M. R. (2006). Linguistic composition map of Iran, color coded map of all languages spoken in Iran. www.farsinet.com/farsi/linguistic_composition_of_iran.html Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press. Lazard, G. (1970). Persian and Tajik. In T. Sebeok (Ed.), Current trends in linguistics (Vol. 6, pp. 64–96). Mouton. Meskoob, S. (1992). Iranian nationality and the Persian language (Ed.), John Perry, trans. M. J. Hillmann. Mage Publishers. Moosavi, S. M. (1986). A sociolinguistic analysis of the Persian system of Taārof and its implications for the teaching of Farsi [PhD dissertation, Austin: University of Texas]. Perry, J. (2005). A Tajik Persian reference grammar. Brill. Pourmohammadi, E. (2018). The use of “Taarof”: The generation and gender factors in Iranian politeness system [PhD thesis, University of Saskatchewan]. Rastorgueva, V. S. (1963). A short sketch of Tajik grammar. Ed. Herbert Paper. International Journal of American Linguistics, 29 [Publication Twenty-eight of the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics]. Rzehak, L. (1999). Tadschikische Studiengrammatik. Reichert. Rzehak, L. (2001). Vom Persischen zum Tadschikischen: Sprachliches Handeln und Sprachplannung in Transoxanien zwischen Tradition, Moderne und Sowjetmacht (1900–1956). Reichert. Schoeberlein-Engel, J. S. (1994). Identity in Central Asia: construction and contention in the conceptions of ‘Ozbek,’ ‘Tajik,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Samarqandi’ and other groups [PhD dissertation, Harvard University]. Sharifian, F. (2005). The Persian cultural schema of Shekasteh-Nafsi: A study of compliment responses in Persian and Anglo-Australian speakers. Pragmatics & Cognition, 13(2), 337–361. Spooner, B. (1994). Are we teaching Persian? or Farsi? or Dari? or Tojiki? In M. Marashi (Ed.), Persian studies in America (pp. 175–190). Iranbooks (IBEX Publishers). Sprachman, P. (2002). Language and culture in Persian. Mazda Publishers. Subtelny, M. E. (1994). The symbiosis of Turk and Tajik. In B. Manz (Ed.), Central Central Asia in historical perspective (pp. 45–61). Westview Press. Taleghani-Nikzam, C. M. (1999). Politeness in native-nonnative speakers’ interaction: Some manifestation of Persian Taarof in the interaction among Iranian speakers of German with German native speakers. University of Texas at Austin.
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22 SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF ARABIC IN THE MIDDLE EAST1 Marie-Aimée Germanos
Introduction This chapter provides a partial update of the chapter on MENA (Middle East and North Africa) published in the previous edition of The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World (Miller & Caubet, 2010). It does so by discussing the ways sociolinguistics and the sociology of language have investigated issues related to the Arabic language2 in the Middle East3 between 2008 and the first semester of 2022. I chose to cover the topics most frequently addressed by researchers, with one notable exception: traditional dialectological studies. Since there is an extensive body of published works in Arabic dialectology for 2008–2022, touching on them would have expanded this chapter beyond a reasonable limit. It is worth noting, however, that anyone interested in Arabic dialectology or other fields in Arabic linguistics that are not discussed in this chapter, can be further informed by following the activities of AIDA,4 AIMA,5 the Arabic Linguistics Forum,6 and the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics.7 Before moving onto the three topics covered in this chapter – dialect contact, variation and change, the contextual use of language, and the social meaning of linguistic codes and code choices – I will provide a general overview of the period between 2008 and 2022, by making some observations firstly, on the impact the geopolitical situation of the Arab world has had on sociolinguistic research and linguistic realities in the Middle East, and secondly, on the general situation the field finds itself in at the present. The period between 2008 and 2022 has been marked by geopolitical and/or economic turmoil in many Middle Eastern countries, mainly Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain. This situation limited both fieldwork possibilities and informants’ availability and readiness to help with data collection in many places, to various extents, depending on the nature of events taking place in each country. This limitation, in turn, led to a decrease in publications about the languages spoken in these states. Moreover, some countries like Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, witnessed popular protests in 2011 and 2019, and these sociopolitical movements had an impact on language use (Mehrez, 2012) and on speakers’ attitudes (e.g., Bassiouney, 2012; Iriarte Díez, 2021), as described by both researchers and some dissertations (see for instance Harb Michel, 2013). Thus, the last 14 years have been marked both by a shift in the field in aerial terms – with a growing proportion of works dedicated to sociolinguistics in the Arabian Gulf – and by a revival of debates, within Middle Eastern societies, related to the comparative roles and values of fus̴ħaː (Standard Arabic) and the vernaculars (see the third section that follows). 269
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On the academic and scientific levels, research in Arabic sociolinguistics entered its fourth decade around 2008, which led to a growing effort in presenting and disseminating the main advances of the field in various handbooks,8 and online.9 Interests in this field also increased in universities in the Arab states (notably at the American University of Beirut and the American University in Cairo), in which students have dedicated dissertations to various sociolinguistic topics including interaction and pragmatics. Additionally, scholars have contributed studies on Arabic sociolinguistics to local scientific publications (particularly in King Abdulaziz University). One has to therefore acknowledge that the locus of Arabic sociolinguistics extends nowadays to Europe, the USA, and Arab states themselves and that the relevant literature can be accessed through various channels, including many recent States of the Arts.
Dialect contact, variation and change Dialect contact, variation and change, remains to this day the most prolific topic in Arabic sociolinguistics with regard to the number of publications and dissertations. Several of the latter have been presented at the University of Essex in England and were prepared under the supervision of Enam Al-Wer. They mainly discuss the outcome of dialectal contact or focus on intra-dialectal variation in various settlements and cities in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, as well as, to a lesser extent, Bahrain, Iraq, and the Palestinian Territories. To this day, the outcome of dialect contact remains the main issue investigated by variationist and social dialectological studies, irrespective of the causes of dialect contact, be it internal migrations (e.g., Najdi speakers settled in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (Al-Essa, 2009)) or simply inter-ethnic contact (e.g., Bedouin and Hadhari speakers in Qatar (Al-Kababji & Ahmad, 2021)). The primary overall trend described is the adoption – albeit not at the same pace by all groups of speakers – of new local variants by migrants, and of the variants of the economically and socially dominant group. In lesser-important cities, however, the variant of locally dominant groups may be leveled like the variants of other groups (for example in Al-Abha, Saudi Arabia, both ʕAsiːri and socially dominant Qaћt̴aːni speakers seem to be losing negators originally found in their dialects (Al-Azraqi, 2016)). Other outcomes of contacts have been identified as well, such as the stylistic and social reallocation of regional features, for instance of northern Lebanese a-dropped variants of CaCaC verbs which are retained and gained expressivity in Beirut (Germanos, 2011), and of traditional Horani features – like the use of u (instead of i) in a series of nouns and verbs, the retention of “dark l” and of a in the CaCiːC noun and adjective pattern – which seems to have become a sectarian feature in Salt in Jordan (Al-Wer et al., 2015). More rarely do authors investigate linguistic diachronic developments that are unrelated to dialect contact; but one might cite Bettega (2017) who showed the effect of simplification at Doha (Qatar), in terms of the disappearance of feminine plural forms in verbs. One interesting novelty of the 2008–2022 time period is the ability to observe the evolution of sociolinguistics situations in “real-time”, by comparing older and newer data or publications in the same field or area. This possibility was notably exploited to unravel the “lifecycle” of the phonological variable (q) in Amman (Al-Wer & Herin, 2011), and hence to show the progressive transformation of heritage (Palestinian/Jordanian) variants (Ɂ/g) into feminine vs masculine variants across three generations. One can also cite the observation made by Sokhey (2015, p. 40); that the palatalization of t and d in Cairo – which was in the 80s more spread among women than men – has now become a “prestigious, unmarked” form. As for the social variables taken into consideration in variationist studies, two of them have particularly attracted scholars’ attention, which can be seen from the publication of States of the Arts 270
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dedicated to each of them: gender (Vicente, 2009; Al-Wer, 2014) and religious affiliation (Germanos & Miller, 2015; Holes, 2019).10 Examples of features distributed unequally across genders include the use of the negator miʃ with b-imperfect verbs in Cairo (Ravier, 2020), and examples of sectarian features include the use of the genitive exponent teːʕ exclusively by Muslim speakers in Beirut (Germanos, 2015). Other social variables, such as ethnicity, are also taken into consideration (Al-Ghamdi, 2014; Alajmi, 2019; Al-Kababji & Ahmad, 2021). One may mention, as well, the dissertation of Taqi (2010), which describes the increase of Najdi variants use among the Ajami ethnic group in Kuwait. More complex indexes are still rarely used, but there are such attempts, like the one by Hennessey (2011), who devised an “integration index” to (successfully) investigate the effects of social integration on the use of Lebanese variants amongst Palestinian refugees in Beirut. Ismail (2008) also notably showed that differences in life modes (inner-city vs the suburb) may help explain why different groups lead linguistic changes in two Damascene neighborhoods. To summarize, our understanding of the outcomes of dialect contact and of language variation and change in the vernacular in the Arabic speaking Middle East has continued to deepen since 2008, but mostly within the same perspective. Arabic variationist studies still need to fully embrace the “third wave” approach, and focus on indexicality in a more consistent fashion. The field might also benefit from a shift of focus, from dialectological descriptions to sociolinguistic pilot studies and/or local observations, notably with regard to the choice of variables, to provide more room for the study of variation that derive from other sources than dialect contact.
Contextual language use Another set of sociolinguistic works conducted in the Middle East is devoted to the description of specific, contextual use of language, or linguistic behavior of speakers. The two main categories of contexts that may be distinguished are defined by the identity of the interlocutor, and by the genre of the interaction speakers are engaging in. The Pidgin used by South Asian expatriate workers and their native Arabic speaking interlocutors has been the focus of important research since 2008.11 From the sociolinguistic point of view, Bizri (2010) interprets the use of Pidgin Arabic by Lebanese (female) employers of South Asian maids as a way to reinforce the latter’s servitude, and observes that this Pidgin is mainly used by women in Lebanon (the male employer rarely understands what she labels “Pidgin Madame”). Furthermore, a comparison between foreigner talk and four Arabic-based pidgins is provided by Avram (2018), who shows how these two codes are influenced by one another. From a variationist point of view, two doctoral dissertations have been interested in variation within Gulf Pidgin Arabic spoken by South Asian expatriates. Notably, Albaqawi (2020) shows that the length of stay is related to an increase in the use of features of Gulf Arabic (instead of Pidgin), particularly for female Gulf Pidgin Arabic speakers. Interdialectal conversation between speakers from different Arabic countries is another type of context defined by the identity of the interlocutor(s) that has been the focus of research in recent years. Earlier findings had shown that, in interdialectal encounters, there was an asymmetric convergence between North African and Middle Eastern speakers (the former exhibiting a far higher degree of convergence than the latter). Recent works since 2008 show that accommodative behavior is, however, also relatively widespread in interdialectal conversations between Middle Easterners themselves; for instance, when Syrians or Lebanese meet Egyptians in Cairo or Beirut (see Haslé et al., 2022; Firanescu, 2021), and that convergent behavior seems less asymmetric between them than it is when Middle Easterners meet North African speakers (see Abu-Melhim, 2012, where both Jordanian and Egyptian speakers converge towards one another). These works also 271
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reveal that the motivation for convergence is multifaceted, and depends on a variety of personal, socio-political, social, and stylistic factors. In the particular setting of a pan-Arabic TV program, Farrag Attwa (2019) observes a relatively scarce convergent behavior, whereby convergence is mainly used for stylistic effect, to sound funny or friendly. It is also worth mentioning that two publications have been interested in language as spoken within the family. Lentin (2012) concentrates on the lexical specifics of baby talk, and Wolfer (2011) describes secret languages (ludlings, argots, and mixed languages) used mainly in Syria, and to a lesser extent by Palestinian speakers, with family (but also friends, fellow students, or in particular professional settings). As for specific language use related to the genre of the interaction speakers are engaging in,12 one can observe that a number of publications have been dedicated recently to Media Arabic.13 The dominant issue in this regard is the social meaning of code choice between Standard and Vernacular Arabic, and this issue will be addressed in the next section. However, a few studies focused on other issues, such as the use of English as a marker of authority and professionalism on Egyptian television (Kniaź, 2016), or the preference of Saudi informants for Standard and Syrian Arabic for the dubbing of non-Arab TV series (Ghobain, 2017). Few other generic or stylistic types of verbal production have been the focus of sociolinguistic attention for Arabic, but one can cite the example of oral narratives. Holes (2015, Chapter 6), for example, identifies linguistic forms and patterns used in stylized and semi-formulaic oral performance. In conclusion, in the course of the last 15 years, we have made a step forward in improving our understanding of linguistic use of Arabic and linguistic behavior of Arabic speakers in a variety of contexts. The study of media Arabic in the Middle East, however, would certainly benefit from a shift of focus from the explanation of factors governing code choice between Standard and Vernacular Arabic, to approaches favoring the description of stylistic variation within the Vernacular or the Standard, and to a greater interest in the use of other languages on Arabic TV stations, when relevant.
The social meaning of linguistic codes and code choices Finally, much has been written in the last 15 years about the social meaning of linguistic codes and of code choices in the Arabic speaking Middle East. A part of this literature has been dedicated to issues of identity and language attitudes, while another part has been specifically focused on analyzing the meaning of code-switching (or of switching to particular codes) in speech. One interesting trend highlighted by more than one recent publication is a shift in attitudes towards the expression of a more positive view of colloquial Arabic in various countries (Shalaby, 2021), including Jordan for instance (Albirini, 2021), as well as a more positive attitude towards Arabic in the wake of the 2019 protests in Lebanon (Iriarte Díez, 2021). A greater acceptance of the use of vernacular Arabic in various settings is made apparent by the answers to the survey of Kebede et al. (2014, p. 66 ff.), and a greater tolerance towards the use of local varieties in the media has also been observed (for instance for Oman, by Bettega, 2016). However, the readiness to express a positive stance toward colloquial Arabic is far from shared by all social groups in Middle Eastern societies, as shown by the criticism of the use of colloquial Arabic by protesters and in news broadcast in Egypt (Bassiouney, 2012; Doss, 2010). Signs of conflicting attitudes towards Standard and Colloquial Arabic are also well illustrated by the debates broadcasted by Al Jazeera and analyzed by Suleiman and Lucas (2012) and are reflected in the linguistics labels used by speakers to refer to these varieties of Arabic (Aboelezz, 2017). A possible explanation of these conflicting attitudes is the existence of both negative and positive indexes for Standard Arabic and Colloquial Arabic alike; these indexes have been depicted by Bassiouney for Egypt (2014, Chapter 3). 272
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Attitudes towards various local or regional dialects have also been the focus of attention14 and have yielded, sometimes, unexpected results. For instance, the dialects of original capital cities are not always being identified as the most prestigious national dialect (see Dufour and Maloom, 2011, for Yemen). Also, a recent study concludes that Arabic is not seen as a main marker of Arabic identity in the United Arab Emirates (Al-Issa & Dahan, 2021), and it would be interesting to see to what extent this holds true in other countries as well. The social meaning of Standard–Vernacular code-switching in speech15 has been particularly investigated in the media (Bassiouney, 2010b), in educational settings (Islam, 2015), and in religious (Bassiouney, 2013) and political (Eissa, 2015) speeches. Each code has been shown to be associated in certain settings with particular topics (Albirini, 2011) or verbal and stylistic activities (Islam, 2015; Hamam, 2011). On the other hand, some researchers have interrogated the reason for gender differences in the use of the Standard: Ismail (2012) showed that this variety was favored by men more than women in Saudi Arabia, which she explains by a lesser exposure of women to activities in the public sphere. This remark however does not hold true for other countries where women are fully integrated to activities in the public sphere, like Egypt, for instance (Bassiouney, 2010b; Abu Melhim, 2012). The social meaning of code-switching between different vernacular varieties (Albirini, 2014) and between foreign languages and Arabic (Kniaź & Zawrotna, 2018) have attracted a little less attention than Standard–Vernacular code-switching in the past 15 years. However, it has yielded interesting results, particularly in terms of gender differences, as women were shown to switch to foreign languages more than men in TV programs (Abu Melhim, 2012) and in dinner gatherings, with a tendency for divergence – for distancing purposes – in mixed-sex settings involving Saudi speakers (Ismail, 2015).
Conclusion In summary, our understanding of vernacular contact, variation and change, Arabic-based Pidgins, dialectal accommodation, language practices in the media and the social meaning of code choices in the Middle East has continued to grow in the course of the past 15 years. On the other hand, it is possible to identify a few other topics that could be further investigated in the Arabicspeaking Middle East: the linguistics practices of children and adolescents (Habib, 2014; Shetewi, 2018), the spread of supra-local forms (Al-Rojaie, 2013; Holes, 2011), and the perception of the existence of national (Al-Rojaie, 2021) and regional (Holes, 2018) koinès, as well as stylistic variation within the vernacular, whether in specific contextual settings or in spontaneous speech. Al-Mubarak (2016), who uses pictures for an elicitation task to unveil a shift in style regarding variants of (g) in al-ɁAḥsaːɁ (Saudi Arabia), has showed that this type of task may be used to study stylistic variation in Vernacular Arabic, a linguistic domain where early variationist tools such as word lists and text reading is generally avoided for fear of interference from Standard Arabic.
Notes 1 I would like to thank Catherine Miller (CNRS-IREMAM) for her support while preparing this chapter. 2 For North Africa see Miller and Caubet this volume. There are also recent publications one might consult to be better informed about research on Arabic in Diaspora (Barontini & Wagner, 2021) and on vernacular Arabic spoken outside the Arab states in non-diasporic settings (Grigore, 2019). These topics and areas fall outside the scope of this current chapter. 3 This chapter being focused on Arabic, I will just briefly mention that the last decade has witnessed an increase in the interest of scholars in minority languages spoken in Middle Eastern Arabic states, such as Neo-Aramaic, Modern South Arabian, Turkic languages, and Domari.
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Marie-Aimée Germanos 4 Association Internationale de Dialectologie Arabe. Information about AIDA conferences and a list of papers published in AIDA proceedings are currently available on this page: https://independent.academia. edu/AIDAAssociationInternationaledeDialectologieArabe 5 Association Internationale pour l’étude du Moyen Arabe et des variétés mixtes de l’arabe, chaired by Jérôme Lentin since 2017. 6 http://arabiclinguisticsforum.com 7 Sponsored by the Arabic Linguistic Society: https://arabic-linguistics-society.uwm.edu 8 See the following references (Owens, 2011; Al-Wer, 2013; and Horesh & Cotter, 2016), but also the ones cited in Caubet and Miller, this volume. 9 For instance through the VICAV platform (Vienna Corpus of Arabic Varieties) https://vicav.acdh.oeaw. ac.at, and the online edition of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics: https://brill.com/ view/db/ealo the latter is ongoingly augmented and contains at least 19 entries of interest for the field (Language and Gender, Variation, Communal Dialects, Language attitudes, Hypercorrection, Leveling, Dialect Koinè, Child bilingualism, Language policies and language planning, Implicational scale, Speech accommodation, Pragmatics, Lingua Franca, Slang, Sociolinguistics of Palestinian Arabic, Ethnicity and Language, Pidgin Madam, Language contact, Youth Speech). 10 See also Versteegh (2017) for a comparison with other linguistic areas. 11 For a State of the Arts on Arabic-based Pidgins see Manfredi and Tosco (2014). 12 In this part of the second section and in the third section, I will concentrate on Spoken Arabic – but some of the issues raised here (notably, the social meaning of code choices) have also been studied for Written Arabic as well. 13 Including a collective book edited by Bassiouney (2010a). 14 For the “Maghreb-Mashrek language ideology”, see the works of Hachimi, Schulthies, and Bassiouney cited in Caubet and Miller, this volume (in the section “Social value of variation/indexicalisation/Folk representations & ideology”). 15 There are many publications interested in the study of Standard–Vernacular code-switching and codemixing in Arabic. Studies focusing on the grammatical aspects of this phenomena, or based on written sources, have been excluded from this chapter. An extensive bibliography of such studies, followed by its three supplements, has been published by Jérôme Lentin. The latest published supplement is Lentin (2022).
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Marie-Aimée Germanos Germanos, M. A. (2015). Sur la répartition sociolinguistique et l’évolution morphosyntaxique des exposants du génitif analytique tēᶜ et tabaᶜ dans l’arabe dialectal parlé à Beyrouth. In E. Al-Wer, C. Hadjidemetriou, B. Herin, & U. Horesh (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th conference of association internationale de dialectologie Arabe (AIDA) Colchester, UK, 2008 (pp. 2–14). University of Essex. Germanos, M.-A., & Miller, C. (2015). Is religious affiliation a key factor of language variation in Arabicspeaking countries? In M. Yaeger-Dror (Ed.), Religion as a sociolinguistic variable [Special issue]. Language and Communication, 42, 86–98. Ghobain, E. (2017). Dubbing melodramas in the Arab world; between the standard language and colloquial dialects. Arabic Language, Literature and Culture, 2(3), 49–59. Grigore, G. (2019). Peripheral varieties. In E. Al-Wer & U. Horesh (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Arabic sociolinguistics (pp. 117–133). Routledge. Habib, R. (2014). Vowel variation and reverse acquisition in rural Syrian child and adolescent language. Language Variation and Change, 26(1), 45–75. Hamam, M. (2011). Loci and rhetorical functions of diglossic code-switching in spoken Arabic: An analysis of the corpus of homilies of the Egyptian hegumen Mattā al-Miskīn (1919–2006) [Doctoral dissertation, Sapienza Università di Roma & Université catholique de Louvain]. Harb Michel, N. N. (2013). “Irhal!”: The role of language in the Arab spring [MA dissertation, Georgetown University]. Haslé, J., van Kampen, N., Germanos, M.-A., & Barontini, A. (2022). Notes sur l’accommodation linguistique entre arabophones. In G. Chikovani & Z. Tskhvediani (Eds.), Studies on Arabic dialectology and sociolinguistics. Proceedings of the 13th AIDA international conference (pp. 340–351). Akaki Tsereteli State University. Hennessey, A. (2011). The linguistic integration of the Palestinian refugees in Beirut: a model for analysis [MA dissertation, American University of Beirut]. Holes, C. (2011). Language and identity in the Arabian Gulf. Journal of Arabian Studies, 1(2), 129–145. Holes, C. (2015). Dialect, culture, & society in Eastern Arabia: Volume III: Phonology, morphology, syntax, style. Brill. Holes, C. (2018). The Arabic dialects of the Gulf: Aspects of their historical and sociolinguistic development. In C. Holes (Ed.), Arabic historical dialectology: Linguistic and sociolinguistic approaches (pp. 112–147). Oxford University Press. Holes, C. (2019). Confessional varieties. In E. Al-Wer & U. Horesh (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Arabic sociolinguistics (pp. 63–80). Routledge. Horesh, U., & Cotter, W. M. (2016). Current research on linguistic variation in the Arabic speaking world. Language and Linguistics Compass, 10(8), 370–381. Iriarte Díez, A. (2021). Language and revolution: Arabic in Lebanon after the October Revolution as a case study. Journal of Arabic & Islamic Studies, 21(1), 5–37. Islam, Y. (2015). English-Cairene Arabic classroom code switching: An interactional-sociolinguistic approach. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies, 16, 7–28. Ismail, H. (2008). Suburbia and the inner-city: Patterns of linguistic variation and change in Damascus [Doctoral dissertation, University of Essex]. Ismail, M. (2012). Sociocultural identity and Arab women’s and Men’s code-choice in the context of patriarchy. Anthropological Linguistics, 54, 261–279. Ismail, M. (2015). The sociolinguistic dimensions of code-switching between Arabic and English by Saudis. International Journal of English Linguistics, 5(5), 99–109. Kebede, T. A., Kindt, K. T., & Høigilt, J. (2014). Language change in Egypt: Social and cultural indicators survey. A tabulation report. www.fafo.no/zoo-publikasjoner/fafo-rapporter/language-change-in-egypt-socialand-cultural-indicators-survey Kniaź, M. (2016). Functions of diglossic and Arabic/English code-switching in identity construction on Egyptian television. In K. Ciepiela (Ed.), Identity in communicative contexts (pp. 117–133). Peter Lang. Kniaź, M., & Zawrotna, M. (2018). Patterns of Arabic-English code-switching in youth communication in Cairo. In A. Ziegler (Ed.), Jugendsprachen/Youth languages: Aktuelle Perspektiven internationaler Forschung/Current perspectives of international research (pp. 599–622). De Gruyter. Lentin, J. (2012). Le lexique du langage bébé (baby-talk) dans les dialectes arabes. In A. Barontini, C. Pereira, Á. Vicente, & K. Ziamari (Eds.), Dynamiques langagières en arabophonies: Variations, contacts, migrations et créations artistiques. Hommage offert à Dominique Caubet par ses élèves et collègues (pp. 91–140). Universidad de Zaragoza, Área de Estudios Árabes e Islámicos.
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23 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN ISRAEL From Hebrew hegemony to Israeli plurilingualism Joel Walters, Dafna Yitzhaki, Shulamith Kopeliovich, Zhanna Burstein-Feldman, Carmit Altman, Sharon Armon-Lotem and Natalia Meir Ancient multilingualism, Hebrew hegemony and Israeli plurilingualism Israel’s geographical position as a land bridge connecting Europe, Asia and Africa, its history of repeated conquest, and its centrality for three major religions have assured a long tradition of multilingualism. Two thousand years ago triglossia reigned, with Hebrew, Judeo-Aramaic and Greek playing meaningful roles. Multilingualism was the norm for the Jewish people during most of the Dispersion, with separate functions: Hebrew and Talmudic Aramaic for religious and literacy purposes, Jewish languages like Yiddish, Ladino or Judeo-Arabic for community and home functions (Rabin, 1981), and one or more “co-territorial vernaculars” for communication with Gentiles. Current Israeli multilingualism began to take shape with the return of Jews to Palestine in the latter part of the 19th century. Subsequent revitalization of Hebrew (Fellman, 1973; Myhill, 2004) was central to nation-building, providing a common vernacular for the integration of a steady stream of immigrants (Bachi, 1956), and guaranteed linguistic diversity (Cooper, 1985). The close of the 19th century brought changes in the pattern of multilingualism. Turkish was the language of Ottoman soldiers and government officials. Village and town-dwellers spoke local dialects of Arabic. Classical Arabic was the written language of the educated elite. Indigenous Sephardic Jews spoke Arabic, too, but Judezmo among themselves. French, German and English were encouraged by missionary churches and foreign consuls (Spolsky & Cooper, 1991). Ashkenazi Jews arriving from Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, also bringing with them co-territorial vernaculars like Russian, Polish and Hungarian. The late 19th century also brought a different kind of immigrant – ideological Jewish nationalists committed to the revival of Hebrew and its intimate connection to identity in their homeland. Jewish nationalism took two distinct paths: a non-territorial cultural nationalism that chose standardized and secularized Yiddish as its language, and a territorial socialist movement that aimed to develop a ‘new Hebrew man’, speaking Hebrew in the newly redeemed land. The battle between the two ideologies and languages was fought in Europe and in Palestine, with Hebrew the victor in the Holy Land (Harshav, 1993; Kuzar, 2001; Myhill, 2004). The brief successes of Yiddish in Europe were weakened by migration and all but wiped out by the Holocaust. Revitalization of Hebrew, from the early teaching of Hebrew in the schools in the 1890s, to its use as the main language by Zionist socialists who founded the communal settlements, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-26 278
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ideological monolingualism in the new ‘Hebrew’ city of Tel Aviv, facilitated the spread of Hebrew. In 1913, its supporters were able to succeed in a bitter argument over the language of instruction to be used at the first university, naming it “The Hebrew University of Jerusalem” (Landau, 1996). By the 1920s, Hebrew was a native language for many and the public language of the Jewish community of Palestine (Bachi, 1956), although many leading academic and literary figures were still far from speaking it comfortably. The British Mandatory government bolstered the standing of Hebrew in several ways. First, when General Allenby occupied the country in 1918, German was banned in schools and teachers interned. Even before the Mandate was formally proclaimed, Hebrew was an official language alongside Arabic and English. Second, to minimize its financial commitment to the mandated territory, the British allowed the Jewish community to conduct its own educational system. As the language of instruction in Jewish schools and in the university, Hebrew adapted to modern life and technology with the help of a Language Committee, renamed The Hebrew Language Academy after independence in 1948. Revitalization of Modern Israeli Hebrew was central in the nationbuilding process, succeeding over the next seven decades in replacing the native language of every immigrant group as the language of wider communication. Nevertheless, today Hebrew is still the native language of a bare majority (51.4%) of Israel’s 9.2 million citizens (Starr & Dubinsky, 2015). The numerous other languages are itemized in the following section. *** The history of sociolinguistic research in Israel had two origins, one by scholars of Hebrew and Arabic (Rabin, Talmon), another by US-trained scholars (Spolsky, Shohamy). See the following section and the chapter on Israel in the 2010 edition of this Handbook for details (Burstein-Feldman et al., 2009).
Language policy in Israel The most significant policy change since publication of the 2010 edition of this Handbook was passage of the Nation-State Law in Israel in 2018. A century earlier, Article 82 of the Palestinian Order-in-Council (1922) obligated local authorities to use three languages, English, Arabic and Hebrew, in the region. At the onset of Israeli independence, Hebrew and Arabic became official languages. With passage of the Nation State Law (2018), Hebrew became the only official language, and Arabic was recognized as ‘a language with a special status’, demoting it from its former status as an official language (Yitzhaki, 2022). This law establishes the Jewish character of Israel with Hebrew as a national symbol. This national policy stands in contrast to Israel’s rich linguistic, religious and ethnic diversity which counts as many as 50 native languages among Israel’s 9.2 million people. A 2011 Central Bureau of Statistics social survey reported over 50% of the population to be native speakers of languages other than Hebrew: Arabic (20%), Russian (18%), with English, French, Spanish and Yiddish each accounting for 1.6–2%. In addition, Israel has close to a million native speakers of: Amharic, Bukharian, Georgian, Dzidi (Judeo-Persian), French, German, Hungarian, Juhuri, Ladino, Polish, including 5,000–50,000 native speakers of Armenian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Greek, Israeli Sign Language, Italian, Portuguese, Tagalog, Thai, Tigrigna, and Turkish. This abundant multilingualism contains a rich mix of ethnic and religious diversity. Native speakers of Arabic include indigenous Muslims, Druze, Christians, Bedouin, and first through fifth generation Jews of North African, Iraqi and Yemenite origin. Russian native speakers include immigrants from the former Soviet Union, for whom Russian was either their native or second 279
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language alongside Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Latvian, etc. Yiddish speakers are found primarily among Ashkenazi religious Jews, where the language is stronger among Hasidic sects.
Bilingualism and bilingual education Since Spolsky and Shohamy’s (1999) Languages of Israel, particularly over the last decade, bilingual language development, bilingual identity and bilingual education have become central to Israeli sociolinguistic research. In 1995, the Israeli Ministry of Education published a policy asserting the importance of both Hebrew and Arabic as languages of instruction in parallel educational streams as well as the need for members of each community to learn the other language. English was designated as the first foreign language, and immigrants were encouraged to maintain their home languages while acquiring Hebrew (Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999). Separate public educational frameworks (pre-school through 12th grade) exist for Arabs, secular Jews, religious Jews and Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Instruction in these frameworks is largely monolingual, while the ‘other’ language is taught as a school subject rather than a language of instruction. There is relatively little mixing of students across these streams, but when present, it is mostly Arab students in secular Jewish high schools. In addition to the public sector, private and semi-private educational institutions are widespread, ranging from church-supported schools in the Arab sector to ‘Talmud Torahs’ in the Haredi sector, the latter involving instruction in Yiddish alongside “lashon ha-kodesh” (the holy tongue). Bilingual education in the form of “dual language programs” comprises a small but growing fraction of the Israeli education system, reflecting “a switch from pursuing Hebrew dominance to accepting, enjoying, and monitoring bilingual development” (Kopeliovich, 2022, p.784.). Basic and applied research on early childhood bilingualism and literacy among typically developing and developmentally language disordered children has investigated language development and identity among English-Hebrew and Russian-Hebrew speaking children (Altman et al., 2021; Armon-Lotem et al., 2014; Walters et al., 2016). Two central issues addressed in this research are the amount of exposure to Hebrew needed to succeed academically in the societal language: distinguishing typical from atypical bilingual development, where children are often misdiagnosed due to lack of assessment instruments and bilingual norms; and investigating various forms of bicultural identity in the framework of family language policy research. Bilingual education has been studied in Hebrew-Arabic (Schwartz & Asli, 2014) and RussianHebrew preschools (Schwartz et al., 2010). The number of Jewish-Arab bilingual programs (variously characterized as binational, multicultural, peace education and critical democratic education) is still low, adding up to 2,600 students attending eight schools across the country (Meshulam, 2022). Binationally and bilingually balanced co-teaching is implemented using flexible bilingualism via translanguaging to enhance bilingualism and create a heteroglossic reality (Schwartz & Asli, 2014). These initiatives are government approved but suffer from local and internal pressures (Meshulam, 2022) and the fact that Jewish students come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds while Arab students are from upwardly mobile families. Israeli schools are largely monolingual institutions, with Hebrew as the language of instruction in Jewish schools (Modern Standard Arabic offered as an elective) and Arabic as the language of instruction in the Arab schools (Hebrew being a compulsory subject from second grade on). The status of Arabic in the Jewish education streams reflects the complex standing of Arabic and its speakers in Israeli society as a whole (Yitzhaki et al., 2020). English is the principal foreign language; it is required for high school matriculation as well as for admission to higher education. Muchnik and colleagues (2016) discuss elective foreign 280
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language learning for two heritage languages (Amharic and Russian) and two languages that are foreign to most Israeli schoolchildren (French and Spanish). In addition to immigration history perception of these languages in Israel, that volume surveys the curricula, matriculation exams, and textbooks used to teach these four languages. Israeli higher education now has nine universities and more than 50 colleges. The campuses have become increasingly multilingual and multicultural, populated by native Arabic and Russian speakers, second generation Ethiopian immigrants, Chinese and Indian foreign students, with some departments including as many as 50% language minority students. Native Arabic speakers are often the first generation of their families in higher education, and they enter as speakers of Hebrew as a second or third language and English as a third or fourth language, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to native Hebrew speakers. Liberal admission policies have not been accompanied by serious thinking as to how to deal with linguistic challenges and high dropout rates. Israel’s language education policy can be viewed as multicultural and pluralistic, yet there are discrepancies between linguistic ideology, management strategies and actual language practices (Shohamy, 2003). Official policy encouraging the home languages in schools rarely comes into practice, leaving home language transmission to the second and third generations subject to parents’ family policy.
Modern Israeli Hebrew Some of the most prolific sociolinguistic research on Modern Hebrew and Bedouin Arabic over the past 10 years has come from the work of Henkin-Roitbart. Her chapter on the sociolinguistics of Hebrew (2020) focuses on its contact with Arabic: asymmetric relations between the two languages as reflected in status, social mobility, borrowing at various linguistic levels, codeswitching, linguistic landscape and most notably on bilingualism. She considers Hebrew a means for young generation Arabs to ‘step out’ from the domestic to the general public sphere (2011). Distinct registers, genres and styles have been investigated in terms of their socio-ethnic and religious dimensions. Muchnik (2007) studied the effect of gender in Modern Hebrew, demonstrating, based on a survey of slang expressions, that Israeli contemporary society is patriarchal with a sexist attitude towards women. Stanford-trained Gafter (2019a, b) examined how sociophonetic variation of pharyngeals in Modern Hebrew interacts with ethnic identity construction. Thus, Ashkenazi Jews rarely produce pharyngeals, whereas Mizrahi speakers exhibit a large degree of variation, particularly as a function of age. Lexical variation in the registers, genres, codes and styles of Hebrew are reviewed in detail by Henkin (2020), showing the vitality of Modern Hebrew in its speaker needs and classical sociolinguistic variables.
Arabic in Israel The starting point for Arabic sociolinguistics was the work of Rafi Talmon on Arabic syntax and dialectology, particularly in northern Israel. His untimely death in 2004 struck a severe blow to research on Arabic dialectology. Henkin (1998, 2020) has continued this project with work on Bedouin Arabic dialects. Arabic is commonly cited as a classic case of diglossia (Ferguson, 1959). Arab speakers in Israel use Spoken Palestinian Arabic (Ammiya) and Modern Standard Arabic (Fusha). SaieghHaddad’s research has been devoted to how these two varieties differ structurally across all language domains and how children acquire literacy skills in Modern Standard Arabic in this diglossic situation when the home language is spoken Palestinian Arabic (e.g., Saiegh-Haddad & Spolsky, 2014; Laks & Saiegh-Haddad, 2022). 281
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Language policy issues in Arabic sociolinguistics in Israel typically center on the issue of nationality. Israel was established as a Jewish state with equal rights for Arabs (Muslims, Christians) and other minorities (Druze, Circassians, Copts, Armenians). But tensions surrounding the notion of ‘national minority’ and national identity have existed from the beginning, sometimes adjudicated through the courts (e.g., the public sign law) and sometimes with violent consequences. The work of Yitzhaki (2022) is exemplary in this area, treating topics such as language policy, language rights and linguistic minorities. Horesh (2021) provides a socio-historical overview of the dialects and identities of Palestinian Arabic speakers in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, discussing how political and societal borders shape variations and identities. Identity is implicated not only when Arabic speakers use Arabic, but also when bilingual Arabic-Hebrew speakers use Hebrew. Gafter and Horesh (2020) show how pharyngeal use in Hebrew among Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals is not simply a transfer from Arabic, but rather socially indexing the speaker’s Arab identity. A recent volume on the sociolinguistics of Arabic (Al-Wer & Horesh, 2019) surveys regional and confessional varieties of Arabic across different language domains as well as Arabic language and ideology. The linguistic landscape of Israel shows the following asymmetry: While Hebrew is common on the commercial signage of Arab towns and villages, Arabic is rare in Tel Aviv and other primarily Jewish cities (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006; Spolsky & Cooper, 1991). Amara (2019) showed that Hebrew enjoys higher visibility than English. This stands in contrast to the presence of Hebrew in the linguistic landscape and audioscape, reflecting Hebraization of Arabic in Israel. Asymmetry is also evident in the directionality of codeswitching, loan translations and borrowings among Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals. Hebrew discourse markers (e.g., beseder ‘all right’, dafka ‘precisely’, pit’om ‘suddenly’) and borrowings (e.g., mazgan ‘air conditioner’, glida ‘ice cream’) give rise to a Hebraized Arabic called ‘Arabrew’ (Hawker, 2018). Hebrew is the main source of borrowing in Palestinian Arabic in Israel – visible not only in Hebrew loanwords but also English words borrowed via Hebrew (Amara, 2020). Arabic speakers also use Hebrew elements when communicating with Arabs outside Israel (Henkin-Roitfarb, 2011). Hebraization of Arabic in Israel can be regarded as a threat to Arab ethnic identity. Amara (2020) lists three major threats to the Arabic language in Israel: challenges related to diglossia, the hegemony of Hebrew in the public sphere and modernization, technological development and globalization, with the latter two factors affecting both language and identity. In contrast, Dubiner (2018) argues that Arabs in Israel do not see extended use of Hebrew as a betrayal of their identity, and most of her respondents did not consider themselves part of a distinct group of Arab codeswitchers. Moreover, greater exposure to satellite broadcasting from the Arab world has been argued to weaken the ties of Arabs in Israel to the Israeli state and strengthen bonds with religious, ethnic and political groups as well as to transnational or regional identities and cultures (Rinnawi, 2012).
Heritage languages of Israel More than 50 different heritage languages are spoken by 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants (Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999). Immigrants to Israel bring with them Jewish languages, i.e., languages/dialects spoken in communities they emigrated from, e.g., Yiddish, Judezmo (Ladino/ Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Tat (Juhuri), Dzidi (Judeo-Persian) (Hary & Benor, 2018). The ‘one language-one nation,’ ideology with Hebrew as the dominant language has led to attrition of other Jewish languages across generations (Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999). Home language attrition occurs in large immigrant communities. Thus, Amharic pre-school children born in Israel have limited abilities in Amharic (Ben-Oved & Armon-Lotem, 2016), and demonstrate 282
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Hebrew proficiency comparable to that of monolingual Hebrew-speaking children, reflecting a shift towards Hebrew within a single generation (Altman et al., 2021). Heritage languages of first-generation immigrants show evidence of intensive contact with Hebrew, resulting in Hebraized hybrid versions used only by bilingual speakers (e.g., Franbreu/ Israeli Jewish French (Ben-Rafael & Ben-Rafael, 2018); Hebrish/Hebraicized English (Olshtain & Blum-Kulka, 1989), HebRush/Hebraicized Russian (Remennick, 2003), Hebraized Amharic (Teferra, 2018), Hebraized Spanish (Berk-Seligson, 1986; Kupersmitt & Berman, 2001)). Some Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel, in contrast, proscribe the use of spoken Hebrew and venerate Yiddish as a “fence” against outside influence. Their opposition to the use of spoken Hebrew is ideological, educational and emotional (Assouline, 2018; Brown, 2018). Meir, N. et al. (2021) survey Hebraization of five heritage languages in Israel-Russian, English, Yiddish, Amharic and Juhuri – which differ for demography, social status as perceived by in-group speakers and by the outside world, the presence and transmission of literacy, and for aspirations to integrate into Israeli society. They argue that all HLs interact with and are influenced to greater or lesser degrees by Hebrew, the only official language of the State of Israel, giving rise to hybrid versions identifiable with bilingual speakers of the particular language pair. Sign language research has flourished over the last two decades. Israeli Sign Language (ISL) is the most prevalent variety, used by Jews as well as Arabs. Village sign languages include: AlSayyid Bedouin Sign Language, Kfar-Qasem Sign Language and a sign language used in Ein Mahel, a Muslim village in the Lower Galilee (Meir, I. et al., 2010). Like Hebrew, which shows morpho-syntactic, lexical and pragmatic influences on all HLs in Israel, ISL is gradually replacing sign languages of smaller deaf communities (both Jewish and Arabic-speaking), leading to new contact varieties (Stamp & Jaraisy, 2021; Jaraisy & Stamp, 2022; Meir, I. & Sandler, 2019). Stamp and Jaraisy (2021) show that bilingual signers prefer ISL over the local Kfar-Qasem variety, supporting the idea that Jewish languages (Hebrew and ISL) penetrate minority HLs and indigenous languages and lead to attrition and eventual loss of these smaller languages.
Israeli Russian: gradual shift from Russian to Hebrew among immigrants from the former Soviet Union The mass immigration from the Former Soviet Union in the early 1990s brought to Israel over 1,000,000 speakers of Russian (Altman et al., 2014). Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union continue to account for more than half of the total number of immigrants in Israel. This immigration wave created a rich ethno-linguistic community with its own economic, social and political networks based on Russian language and culture and identity choices ranging from assimilation to separatism (Remennick & Prashizky, 2022). Russian language is present in all spheres of public life, making it a valuable commodity in Israel (Yelenevskaya & Fialkova, 2017). First generation Russian-speaking immigrants have managed to maintain the Russian language and culture (BenRafael et al., 2006; Leshem & Lissak, 1999). Russian-speaking parents in Israel maintain their home language by speaking Russian to their children as well as by enrolling them in private Russian-only/bilingual kindergartens and afternoon schools (Moin et al., 2013). Regardless of their Russian proficiency, parents perceive their children as Israeli, whereas the children see themselves as possessing multiple identities (Altman et al., 2014, 2021). Despite the ubiquitous presence of Russian in all spheres of Israeli life, recent studies point to a decline of Russian proficiency in adult and child heritage speakers of Russian (Meir, N. & Polinsky, 2021; Niznik et al., 2019; Remennick & Prashizky, 2022). Thus, a recent survey among 283
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Russian-speaking immigrant mothers in four countries (Otwinowska et al., 2021) revealed that although 96% of the Israeli respondents reported that their children are able to speak and understand Russian, 47% of them expressed dissatisfaction with their children’s Russian proficiency. Remennick and Prashizky (2022), in a cross-generational study spanning 20 years, compared first generation immigrants and their children born before and after immigration (known as Generations 1.5 and 2.0 respectively). They reported that besides declining proficiency in the Russian language, generations 1.5 and 2.0 show weak socio-cultural ties with the post-Soviet space. The shift to Hebrew as a dominant language results in Hebraized Russian, which incorporates borrowed nouns for concepts particular to life in Israel: miluim ‘reserve service’, mishtara ‘police’, mazgan ‘air conditioner’, bagrut ‘matriculation exam’ (e.g., Perelmutter, 2018). The authors also report that Hebrew discourse markers (e.g., yofi ‘great’, b’seder ‘all right’, ba-emet ‘really’ have become an integral part of Israeli Russian. Even the Russian speech of first-generation immigrants (ages 60–89) who show very little proficiency in Hebrew, carries traces of Hebrew influence in the form of loan translations (Baladzhaeva & Laufer, 2018). Thus, despite the extraordinary size of the Russian immigration and significant language maintenance efforts, there have been clear signs of a shift towards Hebrew language and Israeli culture in the 1.5 and 2nd generation of immigrants.
English: everybody’s second or third language The role of English grew after the conquest of Palestine by the British and the subsequent British Mandate. Under Mandatory rule, English was the language of government, but contact bilingualism developed, and English served both Jews and Arabs as a ‘neutral’ albeit imperial language of wider communication. By the early 1970s the effects of globalization were obvious to the Israeli public, and English saw growth in status and competence (Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999). Today, English is the de facto international language of the modern world, a prerequisite to career and academic success world-wide, including Israel. Like other languages, English in Israel shows crosslinguistic influence from Hebrew. Studies of cross-linguistic contact and codeswitching report a wide range of functions, the most common of which are maintenance of identity among Englishspeaking immigrants to make a social impression among native Hebrew speakers (e.g., Olshtain & Blum-Kulka, 1989; Soesman & Walters, 2021). English is one of four compulsory subjects on secondary school matriculation exams, and students in higher education must satisfy an English-proficiency requirement at both BA and MA levels. Proficiency in English is a requirement for a substantial proportion of professions and a prerequisite for advancement. In addition, speaking English is associated with a high degree of prestige in social situations (Cooper, 1985; Joffe, 2018; Nadel et al., 1977). Since independence in 1948, about 5% of immigrants have come from English speaking countries. This population tends to be educated with relatively high socio-economic status (Joffe, 2018). Most English-speaking parents speak only English at home to their children, understanding the importance of transferring the language of international communication to next generations (Kayam & Hirsch, 2012). Despite their sociolinguistic uniqueness in Israel, English-speaking children aged five to six in Israel scored lower on English vocabulary compared to their monolingual peers residing in English speaking countries (Armon-Lotem et al., 2021) even though their grammatical skills were within the English monolingual norm. Similarly, English proficiency of adolescents from English-speaking homes was reported to be lower than that of a monolingual baseline group in vocabulary, phonology, disfluencies, speech rate, and morphosyntactic constructs (see Chapter 2, in Polinsky, 2018). However, for English-speaking adults raised in Englishspeaking families in Israel, morphosyntactic abilities were found to be on par, whereas vocabulary 284
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knowledge was more limited as compared to monolingual baseline speakers, i.e., speakers born and raised in English-speaking countries (Gordon & Meir, N. submitted).
Conclusion Multilingualism was not necessarily envisioned by the founders of the state when they legislated both Arabic and Hebrew as the official languages of the country in 1948. Nor did Jewish refugees who came from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East think they were coming to a place known for its pluralism. But the years since Perestroika have been paralleled in Israel by unprecedented demographic changes from immigration and natural birth rates among Muslims and religious Jews far beyond those of the secular population – to a point that Israel can be seen today as a nation coping with a complex collective identity on a daily basis. Multilingualism is strong among speakers of Arabic, English and Russian, where vitality comes from demographics and/or a long literary tradition. Endangered languages such as Yiddish and Syriac (among Maronite Christians) hope to earn a place in the Israeli mosaic. Israeli sociolinguistics beckons for more intensive study of the country’s major social cleavages, between Arabs and Jews, Ashkenazim and Sefardim, young and old, and between elites and the disenfranchised. This kind of research is labor intensive in data gathering, transcription, coding and interpretation. Tough issues are often treated by descriptive, media-oriented approaches, some of them imbued more with ideology than science. Fortunately, the diversity of languages, language users and language issues in polyphonic Israel offers fertile ground for many more devoted sociolinguists.
References Altman, C., Burstein-Feldman, Z., Fichman, S., Armon-Lotem, S., Joffe, S., & Walters, J. (2021). Perceptions of identity, language abilities and language preferences among Russian-Hebrew and English-Hebrew bilingual children and their parents. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 42, 1–16. Altman, C., Burstein-Feldman, Z., Yitzhaki, D., Armon Lotem, S., & Walters, J. (2014). Family language policies, reported language use and proficiency in Russian-Hebrew bilingual children in Israel. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 35(3), 216–234. Al-Wer, E., & Horesh, U. (2019). Arabic sociolinguistics: Principles and epistemology. The Routledge handbook of Arabic sociolinguistics. Routledge. Amara, M. (2019). Arabisation, globalisation, and Hebraisation reflexes in shop names in the Palestinian Arab linguistic landscape in Israel. Language and Intercultural Communication, 19(3), 272–288. Amara, M. (2020). Arabic and identity in the conflict-ridden reality in Israel. In R. Bassiouney & K. Walters (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Arabic and identity (pp. 194–205). Routledge. Armon-Lotem, S., Joffe, S., Abutbul-Oz, H., Altman, C., & Walters, J. (2014). Language exposure, ethnolinguistic identity and attitudes in the acquisition of Hebrew as a second language among bilingual preschool children from Russian-and English-speaking backgrounds. In Th. Grüter & J. Paradis (Eds.), Input and experience in bilingual development (Tilar Series 13, pp. 77–98). John Benjamins. Armon-Lotem, S., Rose, K., & Altman, C. (2021). The development of English as a heritage language: The role of chronological age and age of onset of bilingualism. First Language, 41(1), 67–89. Assouline, D. (2018). English can be Jewish but Hebrew cannot: Code-switching patterns among Yiddishspeaking Hasidic women. Journal of Jewish Languages, 6(1), 43–59. Bachi, R. (1956). A statistical analysis of the Revival of Hebrew in Israel. Scripta Hierosolymitana, 2, 179–247. Baladzhaeva, L., & Laufer, B. (2018). Is first language attrition possible without second language knowledge? International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 56(2), 103–136. Ben-Oved, S., & Armon-Lotem, S. (2016). Ethnolinguistic identity and lexical knowledge among children from Amharic speaking families. Israel Studies in Language and Society, 8(1–2), 238–275. Ben-Rafael, E., Lyubansky, M., Glöckner, O., Harris, P., Israel, Y., Jasper, W., & Schoeps, J. (2006). Building a diaspora. In Russian Jews in Israel, Germany and the USA. Brill.
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Immigrant parents’ lay theories of children’s preschool bilingual development and family language ideologies. International Multilingual Research Journal, 7(2), 99–118. Muchnik, M. (2007). Gender differences in slang expressions as social communications. Social Issues in Israel, 3, 5–20. [Hebrew]. Muchnik, M., Niznik, M., Teferra, A., & Gluzman, T. (2016). Elective language study and policy in Israel. Springer. Myhill, J. (2004). Language in Jewish society. Multilingual Matters. Nadel, E., Fishman, J. A., & Cooper, R. L. (1977). English in Israel: A sociolinguistic study. Anthropological Linguistics, 19(1), 26–53. Niznik, M., Yelenevskaya, M., Nikunlassi, A., & Protassova, E. (2019). Heritage language teaching: A quest for biculturalism? A case of Russian-speaking adolescents in Israel. Russian Language in the Multilingual World, Slavica Helsingiensia, 52, 380–391. Olshtain, E., & Blum-Kulka, S. (1989). Happy Hebrish: Mixing and switching in American-Israeli family interactions. In S. Gass, C. Madden, D. Preston, & L. Selinker (Eds.), Variation in second language acquisition. Discourse and pragmatics (pp. 59–84). Multilingual Matters. Otwinowska, A., Meir, N., Ringblom, N., Karpava, S., & La Morgia, F. (2021). Language and literacy transmission in heritage language: Evidence from Russian-speaking families in Cyprus, Ireland, Israel and Sweden. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 42(4), 357–382. Perelmutter, R. (2018). Israeli Russian in Israel. In B. Hary & S. B. Benor (Eds.), Languages in Jewish communities, past and present (pp. 520–543). DeGruyter. Polinsky, M. (2018). Heritage languages and their speakers (Vol. 159). Cambridge University Press. Rabin, C. (1981). What constitutes a Jewish language? International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 30, 19–28. Remennick, L. (2003). From Russian to Hebrew via HebRush: Intergenerational patterns of language use among former Soviet immigrants in Israel. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 24(5), 431–453. Remennick, L., & Prashizky, A. (2022). Contextualising the Russian to Hebrew language shift in three generations of Russian Israelis. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1–15. Rinnawi, K. (2012). Al-Jazeera invades Israel: Is satellite TV challenging the sovereignty of the nation state? Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, 5(3), 245–257. Saiegh-Haddad, E., & Spolsky, B. (2014). Acquiring literacy in a diglossic context: Problems and prospects. In E. Saiegh-Haddad & M. Joshi (Eds.), Handbook of Arabic literacy (pp. 225–240). Springer. Schwartz, M., & Asli, A. (2014). Bilingual teachers’ language strategies: The case of an Arabic – Hebrew kindergarten in Israel. Teaching and Teacher Education, 38, 22–32. Schwartz, M., Mor-Sommerfeld, A., & Leikin, M. (2010). Facing bilingual education: Kindergarten teachers’ attitudes, strategies and challenges. Language Awareness, 19(3), 187–203. Shohamy, E. (2003). Implications of language education policies for language study in schools and universities. The Modern Language Journal, 87(2), 278–286. Soesman, A., & Walters, J. (2021). Codeswitching within prepositional phrases: Effects of switch site and directionality. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(3), 747–771. Spolsky, B., & Cooper, R. (1991). The languages of Jerusalem. Oxford University Press. Spolsky, B., & Shohamy, E. (1999). The languages of Israel. Policy, ideology and practice. Multilingual Matters. Stamp, R., & Jaraisy, M. (2021). Language contact between Israeli Sign language and Kufr Qassem Sign language. Sign Language Studies, 21(4), 455–491. Starr, H., & Dubinsky, S. (Eds.). (2015). The Israeli conflict system: Analytic approaches. Routledge. Teferra, A. (2018). Hebraized Amharic in Israel. In B. Hary & S. Benor (Eds.), Languages in Jewish communities, past and present (pp. 489–519). DeGruyter. Walters, J., Armon-Lotem, S., Altman, C., Topaj, N., & Gagarina, N. 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24 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN THE CAUCASUS Diana Forker and Victor Friedman
Introduction As a geopolitical region, the Caucasus can be divided into the North Caucasus and the South Caucasus (Transcaucasia). Transcaucasia consists of the Republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan – including polities whose status is still disputed: Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and NagornoKarabakh in Azerbaijan. The geopolitical North Caucasus is entirely within the Russian Federation and consists of a series of Republics (from west to east): Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, KabardinoBalkaria, North Ossetia-Alania, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. Adygea is surrounded by Krasnodar Krai, which, with Stavropol Krai and Kalmykia, forms the northern administrative border of the remaining North Caucasian republics, whose southern borders are defined by Georgia and Azerbaijan. The Black Sea defines the western border, and to the east is the Caspian. The Caucasus, long known for its linguistic diversity, is home to three indigenous language families as well as representatives of Indo-European, Turkic, and Semitic (for maps see Koryakov, 2006 and the website1). The indigenous families are Kartvelian (South Caucasian), Nakh-Daghestanian (Northeast or East Caucasian), and Abkhaz-Adyge (Northwest or West Caucasian). These three were assumed to form a larger Ibero-Caucasian family, but that idea is no longer generally accepted owing to the lack of any plausible reconstruction. Attempts to unite the North Caucasian languages into a single family present serious problems of data and methodology. The time depth for Northeast Caucasian alone is estimated as approximately that of Indo-European (Nichols, 1992, p. 14). The Kartvelian languages are Georgian, Svan, Mingrelian, and Laz. All Kartvelian-speakers in Georgia are counted as (and most consider themselves to be) ethnic Georgians and most live in Georgia except the Laz, who have a distinct consciousness and, with the exception of a single village in Georgia, are across the border in Turkey. Furthermore, there are Georgian communities in Azerbaijan and Iran. The North-west Caucasian languages are Abaza, Abkhaz, Adyghe (West Circassian), Kabardian (East Circassian), and Ubykh. Tevfik Esenç, the last fluent Ubykh speaker, died in Turkey in 1992, which makes Ubykh the only extinct modern Caucasian language so far. Traditionally, these languages are spoken in the autonomous republics of Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, KabardinoBalkaria, and Krasnodar Krai and in Abkhazia. After the Russian conquest of the Caucasus and 289
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the forced massive migration to the Ottoman Empire a growing West Caucasian diaspora formed in today’s Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. The number of languages belonging to the Nakh-Daghestanian family can be estimated to be around 40, depending on which varieties are counted as languages and which as dialects. The internal classification of the family has not yet been unanimously resolved. According to the prominent scholar of Nakh-Daghestanian languages, Aleksandr Kibrik, it divides into the Nakh branch, consisting of Chechen, Ingush, and Tsova-Tush (or Batsbi), the Avar-Andic-Tsezic branch with Avar being the second largest language of the family after Chechen, the Andic languages Andi, Botlikh, Godoberi, Karata, Akhvakh, Bagvalal, Tindi, and Chamalal and the Tsezic languages Tsez, Hinuq, Khwarshi, Bezhta, and Hunzib, the Dargwa or Dargi branch, which in the census and official documents is considered to be one language with dialects, but rather consists of a range of languages and subdialects that include, among others, Akusha/Standard Dargwa, Kubachi-Ashti, Tanti, Mehweb, Sanzhi-Itsari, and a few others; the Lak branch with little dialectal diversification, Khinalug forming its own branch, and the Lezgic branch with Udi, Archi, Lezgian, Agul, Tabasaran, Tsakhur, Rutul, Kryz, and Budukh. Chechen and Ingush are mainly spoken in the corresponding titular republics, and Chechen also in neighboring Dagestan, Ingushetia and in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, and Ingush also in Northern Ossetia-Alania and Chechnya. Tsova-Tush survives in the village of Zemo Alvani in Georgia. Unlike most other Nakh-speakers, who are Muslim, Tsova-Tush-speakers are Christian and ethnically identify as Georgians. Kryz, and Budukh are only spoken in northern Azerbaijan, and Udi, whose speakers are also Christians, is mainly spoken in Azerbaijan and Georgia. Some other Lezgic languages and Avar are spoken both in Dagestan and Azerbaijan, and Georgia is also home to a few small communities of Tsezic speakers. All other Daghestanian languages are exclusively located in Dagestan. Turkic languages in the Caucasus are Azerbaijani and Turkish (Oghuz) and Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, and Noghai (Kipchak). Turkic speakers live in the Northern Caucasus, especially in Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Dagestan, and there are communities in Georgia. Around nine million speakers of Azerbaijani live in Azerbaijan and even more in Iran. Notable communities of Azerbaijanis are also found in Dagestan and Georgia. Today, the largest language of the Caucasus is the Indo-European language Russian, which is spoken not only by ethnic Russians throughout the entire Caucasus, but is widely used as a lingua franca, even though its significance is decreasing in the southern Caucasus. The Armenian branch of Indo-European divides into Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian. Today the latter is mainly used by the Armenian diaspora, but a significant number of Armenians in the Republic of Armenia until recently also spoke Western Armenian varieties. Other Indo-European languages in the Caucasus belong to subbranches of Iranian, i.e. Northeastern Iranian (Ossetic splitting up into two dialects, Iron and Digor), the Southwestern Iranian language Tat (with Jewish and Muslim variants), and the Northwestern Iranian languages Talysh and Kurmanji Kurdish. Further IndoEuropean languages are Pontic Greek and Lomavren (Bosha), a para-Romani language whose grammar is Armenian with significant Indic vocabulary. Finally Assyrian (Neo-Aramaic) is Northwest Semitic and spoken by Christians in Armenia and Georgia.
Language, religion, and identity The Caucasus is not only a multilingual and multiethnic area, but also home to three major religions. Ethno-linguistic groups do not always neatly match up with religious divides and this sometimes impacts on linguistic self-identification and language names. For instance, Jewish speakers of Tat call themselves ‘Mountain Jews’ and their language ‘Mountain Jewish (or ‘Juhuro’)’ while 290
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Muslim speakers call it ‘Tat’. According to Clifton (2003), the differences are not reflected in the level of mutual intelligibility as perceived by speakers themselves. Another example is a small group of ethnic Pontic Greeks who nowadays live in Georgia but who migrated from Ottoman Anatolia to the Russian Empire in the 19th century. They are Orthodox Christians and speak an Anatolian Turkish variety that is called (Caucasian) Urum (Schröter, 2019). Our last example is the Hemshin (or Hemshinli or Hamshin) people who live in the Rize and Artvin provinces of Turkey and some other places. According to Vaux (2007), they can be divided into three groups. The Eastern Hemshinli or Homshetsik are Sunni Muslims and speak a Western Armenian variety called Homshetsma that has preserved many archaic features from Classical Armenian. Homshetsma is also spoken by the Northern Homshentsik who are Christians and live in Abkhazia and Krasnodar Krai. The Western Hemshinli people, by contrast, are Turkishspeaking Sunni Muslims. A primary source of identity for peoples in the North Caucasus in addition to religion was the fact of being a mountaineer as opposed to a lowlander while nationalism in the Western sense was absent (Wixman, 1980, p. 101; Bennigsen & Lemercier-Quelquejay, 1985). In the northwestern Caucasus, clan membership that is only partially reflected in linguistic differences is also important as is adherence to traditional social and cultural norms (e.g., Adige Xabze ‘Circassian Etiquette’). By contrast, language knowledge and use although in theory highly evaluated, is in practice not an essential part of identity. In the southern Caucasus modern identity formation is connected with the nation-state-building processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, for Armenians and Georgians, language represents an integral part of national identity, not least because of their unique alphabets and long periods of literacy, but other factors such as religion and shared history are at least equally or even more important.
Contact in and outside the Caucasus and multilingualism Although the Caucasus is sometimes described as a Sprachbund (Chirikba, 2008), Tuite (1999) argues that it does not fit the model of areas such as the Balkans. Glottalization is shared by all the indigenous and, more significantly, most of the non-indigenous languages or some of their dialects (even though to a far smaller degree), but common morphosyntactic features are absent. A number of bilateral or areally restricted multilateral contact-induced phenomena have been noted, mostly calques and lexical borrowings, but also, e.g., convergence between Ossetic and Georgian/Svan in the position of question words and complementizers (Erschler, 2012; see also the examples in Dobrushina et al., 2021). Until the conquest of the Caucasus by the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century large parts of the southern Caucasus were rather monolingual while in the northeastern Caucasus (Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan) many people were bilingual or multilingual, speaking either neighboring languages or local lingua francas (Azerbaijani, Kumyk or Avar) (Dobrushina, 2016). The online Atlas of Multilingualism in Dagestan2 implemented by a team of linguists from Moscow under the leadership of Nina Dobrushina (Dobrushina et al., 2017, 2020) is based on retrospective family interviews in more than 60 Dagestanian villages and contains data on language knowledge and use patterns from the end of the 19th century – thus well before the massive changes that started with the Soviet period – until today. The website provides rich information, a search interface, and allows the user to create their own graphs and diagrams. The project team showed that asymmetrical vertical multilingualism was gendered in the sense that distant lowland languages were spoken by men from highland villages due to transhumant pastoralism, seasonal work, and trade (Nichols, 2013; Dobrushina et al., 2019). 291
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Language contact studies have been largely focused on loan words, be it older loans or loans from one Caucasian language into another or recent loans from Russian or English. In particular, for traditional comparative and historical linguistics the impact of historical language contact on the lexicon of Georgian, Armenian, and Ossetic, but also other Caucasian languages has been studied by a range of authors (e.g. Martirosyan (2010) for Armenian, Klimov (1998) for Georgian, Bielmeier (1977) and Thordarson (1999, 2009) for Ossetic). Examples of studies devoted to loan words in Nakh-Daghestanian, West Caucasian, and the impact of Russian and English on Georgian are Khalilov (2004), Chumakina (2009), Magomedova and Khalilov (2005), Chechuro et al. (2021), Bellamy and Wichers-Schreur (2021), Shagirov (1989), Amiridze (2018), Kobaidze (2021). The Daghestanian loans database3 is an online resource with data from more than 20 languages spoken in Dagestan and the Qax district of Azerbaijan (Chechuro et al., 2019; Daniel et al., 2021; Chechuro & Verhees, 2021). Purification tendencies in all three south Caucasian countries after 1991 criticize recent borrowings and calques in particular from Russian and English as ‘barbarisms’ and suggest counter measures such as the movement ‘No to Barbarisms’ by the Lexicology Center at Tbilisi State University.4 Some researchers have examined structural influences, pattern borrowing or code switching (e.g. Höhlig, 1997; Kutscher, 2008; Erschler, 2012; Zuercher, 2009; Authier, 2010; Thordarson, 2009; Donabedian, 2018; Amiridze et al., 2019; Maisak, 2019; Forker, 2019; Kobaidze, 2021; Forker & Al Sheshani, In Press). Language contact involving Caucasian languages cannot only be studied in the Caucasus. Armenians and West Caucasian people as well as some East Caucasians have large diaspora communities outside the Caucasus that are the result of the violent events of the 19th century. Also, the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to massive migration of Caucasian people to Russia, Europe and other places. The most comprehensive sociolinguistic studies of diaspora communities are devoted to Circassians, Chechens, and Armenians in Jordan (Al-Wer, 1999; Dweik, 1999; Dweik, 2000; Al-Khatib, 2001; Rannut, 2009, 2011), Circassians in Israel (Kreindler et al., 1995), and Caucasian people in Turkey (Andrews, 1989, 2002; Chirikba, 2009). Heritage language studies are just in their beginnings. Two studies target Armenian and Georgian respectively (Godson, 2004; Lowry & Stover, 2020).
Language policy and language use Since the Russian Imperial Census of 1897 there have been a number of Soviet censuses (1939, 1959, 1979, 1980, and 1989) and after 1991 national censuses that have included questions on language and ethnic identity. For various socio-political reasons census data are often not very reliable. Dobrushina et al. (2021) provide a very good overview on speaker numbers according to the latest censuses and other data for the entire Caucasus area. Similar information for the Russian part of the Caucasus can also be found in Mikhalchenko et al. (2016) and on the website of the project Small Languages of Russia (see the section on Endangerment). Before the implementation of Soviet language policy most languages spoken in the Caucasus had no (long) traditions of literacy. Exceptions are Armenian and Georgian with their own alphabets that have been in use from the early Middle Ages until today. Around the same time when those alphabets were created an ancestor or relative of Udi (Lezgic branch of East Caucasian) called Caucasian Albanian also received a unique script of which a palimpsest was discovered at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai and subsequently deciphered (Gippert et al., 2009) and thus represents a unique document of an old stage of an East Caucasian language. Except for those three ancient scripts Muslim people of the north Caucasus and Azerbaijan have occasionally written local languages with the Arabic script and Mingrelians employed the Georgian script. 292
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Current language policies in the Caucasus have to be understood against the general background of Soviet language policy (e.g. Grenoble, 2003). In the early years of the Soviet Union between 1923 and 1934 the indigenization policy (‘Korenizatsiya’) led to the creation of Latin alphabets for all languages of the Caucasus that had literary status, except Georgian and Armenian. Most of these were changed to Cyrillic 1938–39 (Wixman, 1980, p. 145). The move to Latinization was modernizing and secularizing, and it cut Muslim peoples off from Islamic tradition (and Jews from Hebrew). In the case of Turkic peoples, Latinization was also associated with pan-Turkic ideology. The switch to Cyrillic was blatantly Russifying. Not only were the orthographies poorly designed, using up to four letters for a single sound, and not only did they use different letters for the same sounds in related languages, but Russian loanwords were often written exactly as in Russian with no respect for native phonotactics. All Cyrillicizing alphabets contained the letters necessary for spelling Russian words in Russian even if the letters had no other use. For West Caucasian and East Caucasian languages these alphabets continue to be used in the Caucasus. Only Azerbaijani switched back to Latin in 1991, with a small reform in 1992. According to Dobrushina et al. (2021), in 2017, 27 languages spoken in the Caucasus had the official status of a written language. The article lists the languages and the scripts. For almost the entire duration of its existence in the Soviet Union all nationalities and languages were considered equal, at least in theory. However, Russian had a special status as the language of inter-ethnic communication with the aim of making it the ‘second mother tongue’, which in the northern Caucasus happened with extraordinary speed (Dobrushina & Kultepina, 2021). In all north Caucasus autonomous republics formal education by and large was and still is provided in Russian. In the Soviet Union mother tongue classes were stepwise introduced for a number of larger languages and in some areas primary school education was partially available in minority languages. Today, Russian language policy is increasingly limiting teaching of minority languages, e.g. by making minority language classes optional for children and requesting parents to declare in written form their child’s wish to participate. Schools in regions with minority languages are not required anymore to teach those languages, hours are reduced, new and modern textbooks are rarely published, and language teaching is gradually replaced by classes on cultural traditions, dances, and cuisine that include a few culture-specific words. Furthermore, according to professors of minority languages from the Dagestan State University, mostly poor students enroll in study programs with the aim to become teachers of minority languages because of comparably low salary and low prestige such that the quality and level of teaching is constantly decreasing. Despite some financial aids for institutions devoted to the study and teaching of minority languages and other initiatives such as the introduction of a language day in Chechnya on April 25 or the establishment of the Scientific Center for the Preservation, Revival and Documentation of Languages of Russia in 2021,5 minority languages are losing ground. Yet many publications mainly highlight educational programs, the use of minority languages in the media, and cultural activities such as concerts or theatre plays and lack critical discussion about their results or the number of people who actually participate (e.g. Ataev, 2012; Bitkeeva et al., 2015; Kambolov, 2007; Bašieva et al., 2006). Caucasian languages can occasionally be heard on the radio, be watched on TV or are used in publications, but they are basically not used for any official purposes and most governmental organs do not bother to translate their websites into minority languages. Thus, despite having alphabets and official status both West Caucasian languages and East Caucasian languages, including large languages such as Chechen, cannot said to be ‘written languages’ in their entirety. Only a small minority of those who are able to read and write in these languages practice these activities on a regular basis, usually because their profession has to do with literacy (e.g. teachers, 293
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professors, journalists, writers). Most other people use only Russian even for short text messages on the phone. Nevertheless thanks to the internet north Caucasian languages are now more accessible and one can find Wikipedia articles, other kinds of texts, online dictionaries, and corpora for almost all of them. The situation in the three South Caucasian Republics is somewhat different and displays a number of features typical for language policy in post-Soviet states, namely reconsolidation of the status of the national languages combined with attempts at language purification as well as newly introduced language laws and norms that require minorities to acquire the national languages, de-Russification, and also the need to decide how to deal with ethno-linguistic minorities (HoganBrun & Melnyk, 2012, the papers in Mustajoki et al., 2021). Since the independence of the three states in 1991, language policies have favored the respective national languages Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani over all other languages and promoted them to the only official languages at the national level.6 The manner and extent of de-Russification and policies towards linguistic minorities differs from country to country. For instance, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages was signed and ratified by Armenia (Savitskaya, 2012) and signed but not ratified by Azerbaijan whereas Georgia, like many other Post-Soviet countries, has neither signed nor ratified7 (Hewitt, 2016). Except for Abkhazians, Georgia does not officially acknowledge any minorities as such (Storm, 2016). Even the second largest Kartvelian language – Mingrelian – is not officially taught in school and its written usage is largely restricted to private initiatives, social media, and some websites (Vamling, 2016), and for Svan, which is far more endangered, the situation is worse (Tuite, 2016). Georgian language policy mainly focuses on the national language, in particular on teaching Georgian to Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Minority groups in Georgia are normally bilingual but this does not fully apply to Azerbaijanis and Armenians. One reason for this is that the majority of them live compactly in rural areas of Georgia that border with the respective countries (Azerbaijan and Armenia). In these areas, as well as in Tbilisi, there are schools in which the language of instruction is Russian, others in which it is Georgian and schools that teach in Azerbaijani and Armenian respectively (Korth et al., 2005; Tabatadze, 2019). Through various programs the teaching of Georgian as a second language has been extended and improved yet the success is still limited. Reasons are lack of funding, of qualified teachers, and of suitable teaching materials, but other reasons pertain to questions of identity, social status, and recognition. The limited knowledge of the state language leads to social, political, and economic marginalization (Storm, 2016). For instance, the number of students belonging to ethnic minorities who fail the Unified National Exams that are required to enter the university is still very high (Tabatadze, 2019). Nevertheless, minority groups in Georgia mostly consider it to be necessary to learn the state language and the number of pupils attending minority schools is slowly decreasing (Korth et al., 2005). In addition to the features listed previously, language policy in post-Soviet Armenia had to take into consideration the fact that the traditional Armenian diaspora who have now reestablished cultural, economic, and linguistic links with the Republic of Armenia mainly has a Western Armenian background (Dum-Tragut, 2013). In the Republic of Armenia Western Armenian is rather seen as a threat to national unity and a variety with low prestige that is basically not supported by officials (Weitenberg, 2006). Furthermore, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and a continuous exodus of Armenians, Standard Eastern Armenian has entered the traditional diaspora communities and is gradually endangering and replacing Western Armenian (Dum-Tragut, 2013; Donabedian, 2018). Armenia officially recognizes some but not all of its minorities and financially supports teaching of Russian, Yezidi (Kurmanji Kurdish) and Assyrian as well as publications in these and a few other languages (Schulze & Schulze, 2016, pp. 45–51, Savitskaya, 2012). Instruction in Russian 294
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and Russian language classes were at first severely reduced, but towards the end of the last millennium they were reintroduced albeit not to the same extent as before independence (Zolyan & Hakobyan, 2021). In the language policy of Azerbaijan, the geographical, cultural, and linguistic closeness to Turkey has played a significant role. Turkey financially supported the establishment of schools and other educational institutions and the switch to the Latin-based alphabet. Azerbaijan allocated a broader space to Turkish in the media and the educational system such that de-Russification was accompanied by Turkization (Garibova & Asgarova, 2009). Yet of the three south Caucasian republics Azerbaijan grants the largest space to Russian and language attitudes towards Russian are generally positive. According to Garibova and Asgarova (2009) after independence the number of Russian-medium schools did not decline, and as of 2019 all universities have Russian tracks (Garibova, 2021). Ethno-linguistic minorities are tolerated, but a comprehensive strategy for their development including sufficient financial and administrative support is lacking (Garibova & Asgarova, 2009). Their members are proficient in Azerbaijani but often receive education in Russian schools. Some minority languages are taught in schools and there is limited use in the media (see Clifton, 2002, 2003 for very detailed studies).
Endangerment The crucial events for the current sociolinguistic situation in the Caucasus were the Russian conquest and annexation of the 19th century, the subsequent Soviet renewal of Russian hegemony after the October 1917 Revolution, and the Post-Soviet period. As a result of Russian conquest in the 19th century, an estimated 1.2 million Muslims – mostly West Caucasian people – left the region, and an estimated 800,000 survivors settled in Ottoman Turkey, which forever disrupted the linguistic landscape of the northwestern Caucasus. During the Soviet period Stalin’s deportations, enforced resettlement campaigns in many areas of the Caucasus (often to lowland villages) and intense Russification posed more and more threats to minority languages despite efforts of creating alphabets, publishing textbooks, and implementing educational programs for many minority languages. The last years of the Soviet Union and the period after its break-up with the establishment of the independent south Caucasian republics and the Russian Federation in 1991 witnessed a rebirth of national consciousness and interest in national and minority languages and cultures other than Russian. At the same time, however, violence in the form of wars followed by expulsion and resettlement continued with negative consequences for minority languages. With the exception of Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian all of the indigenous and longpresent languages of the Caucasus are endangered or potentially endangered. At issue is not necessarily the absolute number of speakers but rather the fragile ecology of these languages owing to processes of modernization, urbanization, mobility, and the ongoing effects of official language dominance in everyday life. A growing number of highland villages in various parts of the Caucasus are now underpopulated or abandoned. Caucasian endangered languages generally display vitality in the (highland) villages and morbidity in the towns and newly founded lowland settlements, where Russian, Georgian, Azerbaijani, or Armenian in their (local) standard forms are the lingua francas, the languages of higher education, the key to upward mobility and prosperity, in addition to being the majority urban languages and the unmarked languages in public contexts.8 Official language policy is ambiguous in both the north and the south Caucasus. Many centers and projects with the aim of documenting, studying, and preserving minority languages have been established. In Moscow, there is the aforementioned Scientific Center for the Preservation, Revival and Documentation of Languages of Russia. The Languages of Russia Project website9 and the 295
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Small Languages of Russia website10 provide detailed information on Caucasian languages. At the local level there are institutions such as the research laboratory Unwritten languages of the people of Dagestan at the Dagestan State University11 as well as the introduction of ‘language days’ and the like. Similar activities and, for the most part, official language policies with a positive stance towards minority languages can be found in the southern Caucasus, in particular in Georgia. In Sukhum we can witness some revitalization efforts targeted at Abkhaz by means of implementing immersion classes and language crèches in kindergartens and preschools. At the same time legal and financial provisions for the long-term support and development of minority languages are often missing, as we explained in the section on language policy.
Conclusion Any field of sociolinguistic research in the region will prove fruitful for the future. Issues such as language policy, linguistic identity, language vitality, dialectology, and language contact are better served at this point than variationist studies, sociophonetics, conversational analysis, discourse, ethnography of speaking, code switching, etc. One reason for this is that most research studies standard written languages or is based on questionnaires and census data, but spoken language, actual language use in everyday life is often not deemed to be worth investigating.
Notes 1 http://lingvarium.org/publications/caucas/alw_cau_content.shtml 2 https://multidagestan.com/ 3 http://lingconlab.ru/dagloans/#content 4 Dictionary of barbarisms in Georgian: https://barbarisms.ge/ and https://blog.dictionary.ge/ka 5 https://iling-ran.ru/web/ru/departments/languages_of_russia. 6 However, as Weitenberg (2006, 1902) reminds us, this is a recent development. ‘One of the greatest poets of the area, Sayat-Nova (1712–1795) used these three languages (i.e. Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani) for his works and was understood perfectly in a flourishing regional culture.’ 7 www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list?module=signatures-by-treaty&treatynum=148 8 Note that Russian as spoken in the northeastern Caucasus differs from standard Russian and can be considered a distinct ethnolect (Daniel et al., 2010; Panova & Philippova, 2021; Naccarato et al., 2021). 9 http://jazykirf.iling-ran.ru/index.shtml 10 https://minlang.iling-ran.ru/ 11 http://fil.dgu.ru/scientific%20directions.aspx
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PART III
Australasia
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-28
25 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN AUSTRALIA Peter Collins
Introduction In Australia today English is, as it has been since the commencement of White settlement in 1788, the dominant language. Accordingly, I shall focus in the first part of this chapter on the mainstream variety of Australian English (AusE), rooted in the country’s Anglo-Celtic heritage and recognisable as the national language. At the same time Australia ranks as one of the world’s most multilingual countries. Appropriately, therefore, the second part of the chapter is devoted to an examination of languages other than English (LOTEs) and ethnolectal variability in Australia (for discussion of indigenous languages in Australia see Chapter 26).
Australian English On Schneider’s (2007) scale for the dynamics of New Englishes AusE has reached the final stage of “differentiation”, at which the Englishes develop a capacity to support their own kinds of internal diversification and group-specific identification. Divergent patterns of usage have been identified for Australians of varying background, particularly those with differing socio-economic status, gender, age, regional provenance, and attitudes. The discussion that follows surveys recent sociolinguistic work on each of these variables in turn, while recognising that there is commonly a co-occurrence of several of these with particular linguistic variables.1
Socio-economic background Mitchell and Delbridge’s (1965) pioneering work on the phonology of AusE more than half a century ago identified three sociolects, based on “broad”, “general”, and “cultivated” vowelrealisations, and associated with differences in gender, school type, father’s occupation, and city vs country affiliation. Today, research in “sociophonetics” (Foulkes & Hay, 2015, p. 292) is providing new insights into the fine details of the social patterning of AusE speech variants. Recent studies of vowels have found social class to have a less significant effect than in Mitchell and Delbridge’s study. For example, Cox and Palethorpe’s (2012) study of vowel variability across 116 females living in the socioeconomically higher (northern) and lower (western) suburbs of Sydney, and attending private, independent, and government schools, finds the socioeconomic 303
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-29
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effects to be “rather subtle” (p. 312), while Cox et al. (2014) found that girls from the three school types have converged to a more General form of production with losses at the extreme ends of the continuum. Similarly minimal effects are reported by Docherty et al. (2018) in their study of vowel variation in the speech of 18- to 22-year-olds in Perth, in which social class is defined in terms of neighbourhood of residence. However, there are some reports of socioeconomic effects for consonantal variability, by Ford et al. (2016), and Docherty et al. (2018), who found speakers of lower status to be more likely to produce fricative /t/. Changes over time have also seen a reduction in socioeconomic effects for the “high-rising tone”, a recognisable prosodic feature sometimes now referred to as “uptalk” (for example Warren, 2015). Studies in the 1980s found this feature to be more common in AusE amongst speakers of lower socio-economic status, teenagers rather than adults, and females than rather than males (for example Guy & Vonwiller, 1984; Horvath, 1985). Rapid changes have however seen males catch up to females (McGregor & Palethorpe, 2008; Warren, 2015), while Tobin and Benders’ (2018) listener reaction study indicates that listener ratings of uptalk are not affected by the presentation of such socially biased information about the speaker as occupation and educational level. The influence of social factors on morphosyntactic variation in AusE is suggested by Pawley’s (2008) work on “Australian Vernacular English”, a basilectal variety associated with features generally classified as “non-standard” (for example, yous(e) as 2nd person pronoun, past participle as past tense as in I done it yesterday; and singular was with plural NP as in We was there). Pawley finds Australian Vernacular English to be particularly associated with the informal speech of men with working class and/or rural backgrounds.
Gender Recent research has reaffirmed that, as noted in earlier studies by Mitchell and Delbridge (1965), Shnukal (1982), Eisikovits (1989) and others, gender is an influential factor in AusE. These include sociophonetic studies such as Ford et al. (2016) in which primary school girls were found to use more consonantal pre-aspiration and frication than boys, and Stevens and Harrington (2016), a listening study in which respondents attributed more /ʃ/-like tokens of seat vs sheet to male rather than to female speakers. Grammatical studies include Rodríguez Louro and Ritz’s (2014) comparison of the narrative present perfect and the historic present, which found that males were more likely than females to use the historic present, and Penry Williams and Korhonen’s (2020) apparent-age study of the use of modals and quasi-modals, whose finding of an increasing use of have to led by females – whereas have got to and got to were more often used by males – is compatible with the Labovian principle that females usually lead the way in prestigious incoming changes. Kidd et al. (2011) detect gender-sensitive variation in some features of lexical morphology, observing that the suffix -o in AusE is more often associated with male names than female names.
Age Systematic studies of differential practices between younger and older speakers of AusE have provided apparent-time evidence for change in AusE, with the higher incidence of a feature in younger than older speakers suggesting that it is on the increase, and lower a decrease. Relevant sociophonetic studies include those by Penney et al. (2018) of glottal reinforcement of alveolar stops, those by Boylan (2019), Cox et al. (2018), and Stevens and Harrington (2016) of /s/retraction in words like Australia and street, and that by Loakes (2014) of regionally specific /el/~/æl/ merger (see further next section). Purser et al. (2020) present findings derived from the 304
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longitudinal Sydney Speaks corpus (Travis, 2016–2021), combining apparent-time and realtime approaches to the empirical description of AusE vowel productions over time. Age-graded morhosyntactic/discoursal studies include Collins and Peters (2008), who report a survey which revealed that younger Australians were more likely than older Australians to simplify verb paradigms via the use of past participles such as shrunk, sunk, and sprung as past tense forms, and Richard and Rodríguez Louro (2016), who found older people to be more likely than younger ones to use the narrative present perfect.
Region The view often expressed by earlier scholars such as Bernard (1969) that AusE speech is relatively regionally homogeneous has been largely validated in subsequent research. Using data from the AusTalk corpus (Cassidy et al., 2017), Cox and Palethorpe (2019) determined that of the eighteen vowel phonemes they investigated only a small number were statistically different across four capital cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth). The most notable of these was the GOAT vowel, articulated with a retracted onset and steeply rising and fronted glide not only in Adelaide, as previously observed by Oasa (1989) and others, but also in Perth. A much-studied regional phonological variable is the prelateral merging of /æ/ and /e/, resulting in loss of the distinction between minimal pairs such as pellet~pallet and Ellen~Alan, and pronunciation of words like Melbourne with the TRAP vowel. Loakes and colleagues (for example Loakes et al., 2014, 2017) have established that this merger occurs within the southern region of the state of Victoria but not the northern region bordering NSW. They furthermore observe that those who merge in production are also unable to distinguish /el/~/æl/ in perception. Seminal work on regional lexical variation in AusE was conducted by Bryant in the 1980s and 1990s (for example Bryant, 1989, 1997), mostly concerned with sets of synonymous lexical items (such as peanut butter~peanut paste, and suitcase~port) whose usage is often thought to be associated with interstate differences, but which Bryant shows belongs with areas whose boundaries do not correspond exactly with state borders (for instance, her “South-East” area includes Victoria and Tasmania, along with parts of South Australia and New South Wales). Subsequent investigation of regional lexical variation has been undertaken on both an individual and larger-scale level. Examples of the former are Simpson’s (2001) specific finding that the -o ending on words like arvo (“afternoon”) is more common in the eastern Australian states, and the identification by Richards (2005) and Moore (2010) of largely state-based regional variation with in-jokes about common social stereotypes such as the ownership of unnecessarily large SUVs by the wealthy and privileged: Toorak tractors in Victoria, Kenmore tractors in Queensland and North Shore tractors in NSW. There are two large dictionary-based projects that have been devoted to identifying regionalisms in Australia. A side-project of the Australian National Dictionary was a series of books on regionalisms used in specific states – Western Australia (Brooks & Ritchie, 1994), Tasmania (Brooks & Ritchie, 1995), Queensland (Robinson, 2001), and South Australia (Jauncey, 2004) – while a collaborative project between the Macquarie Dictionary and the Australian Broadcast Corporation resulted in both the publication of a book (Richards, 2005) and an interactive website (Macquarie Dictionary, 2019).
Attitudes Sociolinguistic studies of attitudes towards AusE indicate increasing acceptance of the national variety, once pilloried for its alleged deficiencies (Reeve, 1980). Nevertheless, there are mixed 305
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feelings over non-standard features of AusE, associated as they are not only with authenticity but also uncouthness. In a study by Willoughby et al. (2013) some 600 high school students were asked what they think of when they hear the term “AusE”, and the ensuing responses then subdivided into three categories: “neutral” (56%), “negative” (32%), and “positive” (12%). Comments on informal, slang and non-standard usage are reported to have predominated in the negative evaluations, many of which invoked the pejorative term bogan (denoting an unrefined, uneducated, lower class individual). Insights into widespread conceptualisations of AusE are afforded by various studies of media voices. Price (2012) traces changes in the accents encountered in Australian news broadcasts during the 20th century. She observes that “BBC English” dominated until the 1960s when, alongside the consolidation of Australia’s national identity, Australian accents began to dominate. Bye et al. (2007) confirm that it was from the 1970s that Broad accents began to loom large in Australian cinema, theatre and television, and particularly in the genre of comedy. Attitude measurement studies, began to flourish in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, as a means of obtaining evaluations of Australian accents along the Broad–Cultivated continuum, and of ethnically accented voices (Ball et al., 1989). Within this tradition, Starks et al. (2017) asked their high-school respondents how important it would be for them to retain their Australian accent if they moved overseas. Many of the 54% who responded “important” or “very important” were motivated by the notion of accent as a marker of identity. Penry Williams (2019) uses interviews with her 20- to 25-year-old participants to probe their views, often expressed explicity but also sometimes implied, on the social stereotypes associated with various linguistic features. In the tradition of tests on the acceptability or otherwise of disputable usages (Collins, 1989; Lee, 2002), a study by Severin (2017) asked Australians of various ages to rate the acceptability of 25 disputable usages such as it’s for its, emphatic literally, double comparatives, ain’t, would of, and singular they, as either “used by you”, “acceptable when used by others”, or “unacceptable”. While younger speakers deemed non-standard features such as ain’t and double comparatives to be acceptable in informal contexts, the finding that they were less likely to use them themselves indicates that such forms are still stigmatised. Finally, there have been several scholarly investigations of Australian attitudes towards the “Americanisation” of AusE. While younger Australians are often blamed for being the main users of Americanisms (for example Damousi, 2007), both Ferguson (2008) and Korhonen (2017) find that they are no more tolerant of Americanisms than older Australians.
LOTEs and ethnic varieties In Australia today more than 200 LOTEs (language other than English) are in use, including both migrant languages (whose speakers have increased dramatically in number since the end of World War II), and also a number of surviving Aboriginal languages (see Chapter 26). Australia’s annual migrant intake is currently higher than it was in the post-war era, with the emphasis on skilled migration rather than family reunion and refugee resettlement (Department of Immigration and Border Protection, 2017). Figures from the 2016 Australian census indicate that 22.2% of the population spoke a language other than English (LOTE) at home (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017). Apart from English, the most widely spoken languages were Mandarin (2.5%), Arabic (1.4%), and Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Italian (each 1.2%). According to Clothier (2020) the past decade has seen a shift of orientation in research on ethnolectal variability in AusE. Pre-2010 studies had assumed a direct relationship between ethnolects and ethnic heritage. The first major study of ethnolects, by Clyne et al. (2001), described 306
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them as varieties of English used by many second and later generation Australians, primarily in the home domain with parents and grandparents, and displaying varying levels of interference from the native language (such as the use of an open vowel for schwa in the final syllable of words such as pleasure and over, the replacement of /θ/ and /ð/ by /t/ and /d/, and grammatical features such as such as loss of plural inflections on nouns and tense inflections on verbs, and double negation). Earlier studies described a pan-ethnic variety popularly referred to as “Wogspeak” (Warren, 1999; Kiesling, 2005), used especially by young Australians of second generation Middle Eastern and Mediterranean background, which reportedly serves as a badge of identity that enables its speakers to differentiate themselves from both their parents’ values and those of the Anglo host culture. A salient phonological characteristic of this variety is the extreme broadness of the vowels, as for example in the strong backing and raising of the nucleus of /aɪ/, which prompted Horvath (1985) to coin the label “Ethnic Broad”, an accent style which in her view represented a furthering of changes already in progress in AusE. Work within the traditional paradigm targeting the relationship between ethnolects and ethnic heritage has continued to the present day, much of it devoted to investigating Lebanese AusE. In her study of “Arabic-heritage-AusE”, Rieschild (2007) cites a number of distinctive features (such as raised pitch and vowel length differences), leading her to postulate a variety called “Lebspeak”. To the extent that Lebspeak is not limited to those of Lebanese background, it is pan-ethnic in nature like Wogspeak. Cox and Palethorpe’s (2011) study identifies some vowel realisations used by Lebanese Australians that differ from those of their Anglo-Celtic informants (such as a backer STRUT, a higher LOT, and a lower NURSE vowel), and a tendency for longer VC rhymes, which they suggest might reflect the influence of Arabic metrical structure. Australian ethnolectal research over the past decade has tended to focus on the complex relationship between ethnicity and ethnic identity, with ethnicity framed as a social psychological construct determined by speakers’ ethnic identities (Clothier, 2020, pp. 158–165). The ethnic orientation of informants is typically profiled via a questionnaire covering such topics as language use, social networks, community activities, and attitudes towards cultural heritage. An additional feature of this research is the attention given to more recent migrant groups. In Ndhlovu’s (2010) questionnaire-based study his nineteen non-refugee African informants living in Victoria expressed positive attitudes towards their ethnic languages, an outcome ascribable to the exigencies of group socio-cultural cohesion within migrant communities of shared linguistic backgrounds, and their desire to maintain strong connections with their native homeland. In Alimordian’s (2014) study of the relationship between ethnicity and the use of vocative mate, across respondents of Iranian, Chinese, and “European” backgrounds, a questionnaire was employed which revealed that strength of ethnic identity correlated with duration of residence in the heritage country prior to arrival in Australia. The rate of use of mate (53%), with its traditional associations in Australia of masculinity and egalitarianism, was lower than the 75% rate for the mainstream Australians recorded in Rendle-Short’s earlier (2009) study. Furthermore, Alimordian found that vocative mate was not related to ethnic grouping but, predictably, to (weakness of) ethnic identity. Another study that utilises an ethnic orientation questionnaire and targets a more recent migrant group, is Bharadwaj’s (2014) discourse-pragmatic investigation of the use of epistemic/evidential expressions such as I feel and I think by native speakers of Indian English in Perth. The most commonly used expression in the study, particularly by males, was I would say, leading Bharadwaj to propose that it has become a marker of Indian Australian ethnic identity. The women in this study were more likely than the men to use I think, suggesting that they are leading the way in the acquisition of a more mainstream Australian style of interaction. 307
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A number of recent phonetic/phonological studies have embraced an ethnic identity constructivist approach, and in many cases have confirmed the close interaction between ethnicity and gender. For example, Clothier and Loakes’s (2018) study of voice onset times with voiceless stops amongst Lebanese Australians found that the women and men performed their ethnic identities differently, the women’s duration increasing with ethnic identity strength, but the men’s durations being shorter overall. Clothier’s (2019) acoustic analysis found that identities influenced by social networks and gender provided an explanation for the tendency for /l/ production by Lebanese Australians to become clearer word-initially. Since 2015 researchers in the Sydney Speaks project have focused on ethnic and linguistic diversity, employing a real-time change perspective facilitated by the availability of both data collected in the 2010s and of Horvath’s earlier (1985) data. Amongst other studies, that conducted by Grama et al. (2020) examines the acoustic qualities of word final -er – a variable also previously investigated by Horvath (1985), Kiesling (2005), and Cox and Palethorpe (2018) – showing that it has become longer, lower and backer over time, a change whose early signs of development amongst Greek teenagers in the 1970s were observed in Horvath (1985).
Conclusion As Australian society and language continue to grow and change, there are multiple challenges and prospects for future research, responding inter alia to ongoing social, regional, and ethnic differentiation. The potential for sociophonetic research to shed light on the role of social networks and interactional dynamics in speech production and processing remains largely untapped (Loakes, 2020, p. 115), as does that of research using age-graded data to pinpoint changes over time, and that of the big data afforded by corpora such as those held in the Australian National Corpus collection (Musgrave & Haugh, 2020) to facilitate research on both synchronic and diachronic variation.
Note 1 For readers seeking more comprehensive discussion of the topics addressed in this chapter, see Willoughby and Manns (2020).
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26 SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH INTO INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES OF AUSTRALIA Jill Vaughan, Ruth Singer and Gillian Wigglesworth
Introduction The wider sociolinguistic context of contemporary Indigenous Australia takes in a great diversity of local language ecologies, ranging from small remote communities, where many ancestral languages are spoken to large cities, where Aboriginal Englishes are used within superdiverse contexts alongside other Englishes and languages. Prior to colonisation, some 800 varieties – more than 250 distinct languages – were spoken across Australia. Since that time the region’s linguistic heritage has been decimated with fewer than 15 languages still learned by children today, located mainly in the north and centre of Australia. However, recent years have also seen incredible resilience and creativity in the emergence of new varieties and in revitalisation efforts across the country. The rapid and drastic social changes of the past two centuries have produced similarly seismic sociolinguistic shifts. Some sociolinguistic work has been possible within the small speaker communities of many Australian languages, but other approaches (e.g., variationist sociolinguistics) have only been possible where larger speech communities exist. As a result, the application of such methods has been somewhat limited. Nevertheless, recent years have seen sociolinguistic work in the Australian context increasingly engage with global methodological developments and ethical debates. Although social questions have long occupied a central location in linguistic work in the Australian context, the sociolinguistics of Australian Indigenous languages is now developing as a field in its own right, answering the call for more diverse data across many subfields of linguistics (e.g., Stanford, 2016) with regular workshops and growing numbers of graduate researchers expanding the limits of the topic. In this chapter, we provide an overview of key sociolinguistic research in Indigenous Australia, taking in both pre- and post-colonial contexts. Our discussion is structured around four interconnected strands which represent key gathering points of research endeavours. The second section considers work on linguistic variation. This work has traced the evolution of indexical links between linguistic practice and social categories from pre-colonial formations – connecting to categories such as kin and territory – to more recent expressions of subcultural and generational identities. In the third section, we move beyond single languages to explore multilingual repertoires, with a focus on code-switching and the small-scale multilingual ecologies of Arnhem Land (northern Australia). DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-30 312
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313 Figure 26.1 Languages and locations referred to in this chapter Source: © Jill Vaughan 2022
Jill Vaughan, Ruth Singer and Gillian Wigglesworth
The fourth section looks at contact between speakers of different varieties and the contact languages that can result, while the fifth section considers sociolinguistic work on children’s language practices. Across each theme, we include recent, innovative and Indigenous-led research.
Variation, regions and social groups The past two centuries have seen dramatic changes in the social categories indexed by linguistic variation in Aboriginal Australia, in response to broader shifts wrought by colonialism and its attendant processes. Variation in the pre-colonial era was likely associated with categories like kin, clan, moiety, totems and territorial connections, while more recent practices express subcultural and generational identities while also reflecting evolving connections to longstanding social categories. In this section, brief accounts are given of (i) the nature of variation and associated social categories across the region prior to 1788; and (ii) how these formations have changed since European invasion and the associated increase in urban settlements. Mansfield (2023) provides a more in-depth treatment of this topic. Accounts of the linguistic and socio-indexical characteristics of variation in the pre-colonial and early post-colonial era are necessarily reconstructive in nature. The closest we may get to a ‘true’ account is to carefully extrapolate from post-colonial practices in regions less affected by colonialism, and contemporary communities’ accounts of historical practices. In some cases, early colonial vocabularies and other records are instructive, but for the most part information was not recorded about dialectal and other forms of variation. We know somewhat more about the nature of traditional social life, which across much of the continent occurred within small, often nomadic, groups. Where more stable food and water resources existed, groups were typically more settled. Larger groups gathered for activities such as regional ceremonies and funerals. Social groups were mobile, fluid and heterogenous, with exogamous marriage a common driver of intergroup mixing. Differences in speech were often associated with territorial affiliation but – given the heterogeneity of social groups – these differences were “internal to society, not markers of the edges of different societies” (Sutton, 1997, p. 240). Individuals commonly connected to territory through the clan group they belonged to – an affiliation inherited through their father, or father’s father. Speakers might index their link to a tract of land by deploying a particular code (Vaughan 2023, see the section on Multilingualism) or by drawing on sociolinguistic variables. This could enable the speaker to claim particular rights as a clan member within the local interaction, while use of a variant associated with another clan might in some cases show respect to an interlocutor when travelling on that person’s country (e.g. Sutton, 1978, p. 164). Speakers of certain Arnhem Land languages (e.g. Bininj Kunwok) draw on linguistic variants exclusively owned by a clan. In Bininj Kunwok, this system is called kundangwok, and it comprises clan-specific interjections and verbal prefixes, which speakers may draw on in conversation or more formal speech contexts to index that clan (Garde, 2008a). Varieties of this kind tend to index patrilineal inheritance, but cases linking to the matrilineal line have been attested. Within the Western Desert dialect cluster, variables such as case and tense suffixes were found to map loosely onto tracts of land but did not cohere neatly into dialects. Speakers’ affiliations influenced – but did not entirely predict – their usage, with personal life histories also playing a role and multi-dialectal competence commonplace (e.g., Hansen, 1984). Overarching clan/territory-based variation is the case of ‘moiety-lects’ where variables index one of two moieties (binary division of the natural world) with which individual clans are associated. In eastern Arnhem Land, this creates sociolects which are geographically non-contiguous (as clans from each moiety may not be adjoined). Given the centrality of kin relationships to social life in Indigenous Australia, it is unsurprising that differences in speech (not just lexical variation but also differences 314
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in prosody, pragmatics and even physical posture) can also index kinship relations, such as the use of circumspective language with in-laws and jocular language with certain kin such as uncles (e.g., Garde, 2008b). Seniority (in age and/or ceremonial status) may also be marked in linguistic practice, with senior speakers using particular prosodic and lexical features. For example, men’s participation in the lúrra fish-poisoning ceremony is predicated on their ability to demonstrate use of njalkkidj (‘soft’) variants of Ndjébbana (McKay, 2000, p. 159). Since ceremonial participation was typically highly gendered, certain alignments between gender and linguistic practice emerge from this domain, but cases of gender-specific variation in everyday life are also attested (e.g., in Yanyuwa) (see, e.g., Bradley & Gaby, 2023). Looking across both pre-and post-colonial contexts, Mansfield (2023) observes that certain linguistic features are more commonly subject to variation than others: word-initial reduction is attested historically across the continent and continues to be recruited to do sociolinguistic work, while demonstratives, case suffix forms, and open-class lexemes are other common sites of variation. The post-colonial context provides many emergent indexicalities for linguistic variation. Contemporary repertoires draw on English and contact varieties, especially Australian Kriol, with the linguistic performance of connection to generational identities and other subcultures a major postcolonial development. Pre-colonial social groups were unlikely to have constituted large enough cohorts to support youth subcultures but increasing urbanisation over the past 200 years has created larger communities and reconfigured social structures such that these kinds of formations are now commonplace. Youth or ‘slang’ varieties have been described in several communities, such as Areyonga Teenage Pitjantjatjara (Langlois, 2004) and mutumutu (‘short’ speech) (Minutjukur et al., 2019) in central Australia and Murriny Kardu Kigay, a variety of Murrinhpatha spoken at Wadeye (Mansfield, 2013). These are restructured varieties of an ancestral language, and they usually draw significantly on English features. Hamilton (1981) points to the importance of peer group socialisation in north central Arnhem Land where each child becomes part of a ‘kid mob’ from age five that is organised around shared languages and kinship. A significant proportion of children’s linguistic input comes from these peer groups, and they likely provide foundations for the social structure and linguistic practices of youth subcultures for older children. Recent sociolinguistic work in this context has increasingly moved beyond traditional dialectologies to draw on second- and third-wave approaches which centralise ethnographic methods, communities of practice analyses and emphasise that identity is performative. Marley’s (2020) analysis of variation in Bininj Kunwok reveals rampant inter- and intraspeaker micro-variation, much of which is not well accounted for by local social categories. Socio-territorial identities do not predict use of variants by Bininj speakers, and as in the Western Desert variants do not cohere particularly systematically into lects (see also Vaughan, 2018a). Instead, Marley suggests that there is “perpetual variation, with the variants of a variable in a constant state of flux” (2020, p. 367). In this sense, Marley locates her study within a nascent ‘fourth wave’ which takes a more cross-disciplinary approach to analysing variation and centres small-scale and Indigenous language communities. Recent work in the language revitalisation context – particularly in communities in Australia’s south and east – has also addressed variation, highlighting tensions between standardisation/prescriptivism on the one hand and the personal and community identity–building nature of language revitalisation and redevelopment on the other (e.g., Couzens et al., 2020).
Multilingualism Multilingualism has always been a feature of Indigenous Australian communities. However, colonisation has not only caused a decline in the use of ancestral Indigenous languages, it has also led to changes in the ways that Indigenous communities are multilingual (Vaughan 2023). Generally, 315
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communities support a smaller number of Indigenous languages and the set of languages used may include not just ancestral languages but new contact varieties including Indigenous varieties of English. Many Indigenous communities are reviving an ancestral language, which becomes a resource to re-invigorate the community with a new kind of multilingualism (Stebbins et al., 2017). Most communities are also multi-dialectal, as both Indigenous English varieties and standard English are spoken within the community. In this section we look at recent sociolinguistic research on multilingualism with communities in Australia’s far north, which have maintained some of their ancestral languages since European settlement. These communities include Warruwi and Maningrida in Arnhem Land where most people are multilingual in a number of small Indigenous languages. The puzzle for linguists is how it has been possible to maintain this level of community-wide multilingualism (Singer, 2018). In many other areas of Australia a similar situation occurred in the past, but is no longer the case due to a shift towards one or two community languages, only one of which is ancestral. For example, given how innovations spread across language boundaries, Rumsey (2018) argues that high levels of multilingualism in the northern Kimberleys allowed such sound changes to diffuse across language boundaries, below the level of awareness. Meanwhile the motivation for people to keep languages distinct prevented borrowing of more socially salient features of each language, such as words. While Rumsey (2018) is a historical case, in the Arnhem Land communities of Maningrida and Warruwi it is still the norm for people to be multilingual in ancestral languages from different language families (Vaughan, 2018a). Ethnographic research with these communities has found that a positive orientation to social and linguistic differentiation promotes language ideologies and practices that enable the coexistence of many languages (Singer & Harris, 2016). This kind of language ecology, identified in many parts of the world, has been described as small-scale multilingualism (Vaughan & Singer, 2018). The defining feature of small-scale multilingualism is that each language is equally valued, there is no hierarchy of status among languages, as in diglossic contexts. In Indigenous Australia each language derives its value from the fact that it belongs to a specific area of land, due to the actions of creator beings (Merlan, 1981). In addition to the lack of diglossia, there were no lingua francas before English became widely spoken. However, in Arnhem Land and other regions we can see that alternate sign languages used by different groups have strong similarities and could assist communication where no common language is available (Green & Jorgensen, in press) In Maningrida and Warruwi communities, languages from four different families are spoken. Most children grow up with more than one language being spoken around them. Adults typically speak two to five languages, with some speaking as many as eight. On top of this, everyone understands a few more languages but does not speak them. Many conversations are multilingual in these communities and there are a number of different ways that more than one language is drawn on. Each person may stick to one language, or individual speakers can move between two or more languages. One feature of multilingual language use, for example at Warruwi, is that people do not always accommodate to the person they are speaking to. In a practice known as receptive multilingualism, two people can speak to one another in quite different languages, while understanding the other person’s language (Singer, 2018). Code-switching is another way conversations can be multilingual. In this case, a single person uses more than one language, moving back and forth between them. Moving between Indigenous languages more often occurs at the macro-level, between larger stretches of speech such as paragraphs or between turns or sentences. This kind of code-switching is documented not only 316
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in conversation but also in ancestral songs and myths, when characters switch when speaking to different people, or as they cross borders between one language area and the next (Evans, 2010). Code-switching between ancestral languages within a sentence, turn or clause seems to be rare, at least in recorded data. However, both Vaughan (2021) and Singer (2023: chapter 5) give examples of conversations in which two participants mix two Indigenous languages in this way. Conversations like these tend to be informal and are often between close relatives who belong to a social group which is identified closely with two Indigenous languages. In more formal, public contexts, this kind of dense, intrasentential code-switching is rare and recording sessions with linguists are often understood to be similar kinds of contexts. Such recordings are made for a listening public by authoritative speakers of a specific language. Intrasentential code-switching between an Indigenous language and English on the other hand is very commonly heard and recorded in both Warruwi and Maningrida. This implies that something like a language ideology or aesthetic is motivating avoidance of intrasentential codeswitching between Indigenous languages. In Maningrida, where Burarra is the most widely spoken Indigenous language, moving between Burarra and English seems to be becoming conventionalised for certain kinds of public speeches (Vaughan, 2021). Code-switching between Burarra and English is also being embraced by younger people, such as author Abbie Carter, indexing a multianchored identity across ancestral homelands, Maningrida community and the regional capital Darwin (Vaughan & Carter, 2022).
Language contact and contact languages Since colonisation, various contact languages have emerged from encounters between ancestral languages and English. Some are now the main language for many Aboriginal people. Complex repertoires may draw on ancestral languages and English alongside contact varieties, combined in diverse patterns of multilingualism responsive to many sociocultural factors. Most work on Australian language contact focuses on the colonial/post-colonial period, but of course contact existed between communities speaking ancestral Aboriginal languages prior to this period (e.g., Vaughan & Loakes, 2020). We focus on the sociolinguistic context of post-colonial language contact (see longer accounts in Meakins (2014), McConvell (2010) and Vaughan and Loakes (2020)).
Pidgins and creoles Australian pidgins are likely to have been historically underreported as pidgins are often transient and disappear without documentation. Pidgins were especially important for communication at colonial frontiers and along the seafront, in trade and fishing. Most have been English-based and they include New South Wales Pidgin (e.g., Troy, 1990). In southern Australia, pidgins acrolectalised becoming more like English, while in the north where Aboriginal people from diverse language groups were (usually brutally) brought together on cattle stations or missions, the pidgin often became a lingua franca alongside ancestral languages and then a native language – Australian Kriol. Kriol is English-lexified, but a great deal of the structural, semantic and phonological properties are attributable to influence from local Aboriginal substrate languages (Meakins, 2014). The term ‘Kriol’ takes in a number of mutually intelligible lects stretching across northern Australia, it is now the largest Australian Aboriginal language with around 20,000 speakers. Another important creole in the Australian context is Torres Strait Creole, spoken in the Torres Strait (Meakins, 2014). 317
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Mixed languages Code-switching between ancestral languages and English or Kriol is commonplace in many communities of central and northern Australia (Mushin, 2010). Mixed languages develop from these code-switching practices such that the resulting stable variety cannot be said to have just one single linguistic ancestor (Matras & Bakker, 2003). Recent work on various mixed languages in the Australian context demonstrates this, for example Gurindji Kriol (Victoria River District) draws nominal constructions from Gurindji and verbal material from Kriol (Meakins, 2011). Mixed languages arise in contexts of community bilingualism where a shared language exists already, but some identity-related goal is served by the emergence of a new variety. Gurindji Kriol found its origins in the context of the Gurindji workers’ strike and land rights struggle of the 1960s–70s and continues to express a connection to Gurindji identity.
Koines and new dialects Koines are the stabilised result of mixing between lects, levelling of linguistic differences, and (typically) simplification. Like other Australian contact varieties, they emerge from new encounters between groups, changing mobilities and social upheaval, but do not necessarily involve influence from English or Kriol. Koines described in the Australian context include Dhuwaya, which developed in Yirrkala, Arnhem Land (Amery, 1993) and koineisation processes are suggested to have occurred in various other varieties, for example Papunya Luritja (Heffernan, 1984), Modern Djambarrpuyngu (Wilkinson, 1991) and some Bininj Kunwok varieties (Evans, 2003).
Aboriginal Englishes The widespread eradication of Aboriginal languages and the region’s rapidly changing linguistic landscape has meant that a large proportion of Aboriginal Australians draw on English within their linguistic repertoires every day. Often these varieties differ from mainstream varieties in lexicon, grammar, sound system, timing, politeness strategies and body language (e.g., Clews, Rodríguez Louro & Collard, 2022; Loakes et al., 2018). ‘Aboriginal Englishes’ provides an umbrella term for the continuum of varieties, ranging from acrolectal (or light – closer to the standard) to basilectal (heavy – furthest from the standard). For many speakers, Aboriginal English is an L1 while for others it sits alongside Kriol, ancestral languages and/or other Australian Englishes within their repertoire. Eades (2013, p. 1) notes that Aboriginal Englishes continue to be influenced by Aboriginal languages and cultures as well as by English. As is also the case for Kriol, attitudes to Aboriginal English vary significantly. Many do not understand that the variety is stable and rule-governed (Sellwood & Angelo, 2013), and misrepresent it as a ‘lazy’ or ‘uneducated’ version of mainstream Australian English (Eades, 2013, p. 18). Elsewhere attitudes are extremely positive, however, with the variety seen as a powerful expression of cultural identity and increasingly visible in mainstream media.
Child language Despite Indigenous people being only 3% of the total Australian population, Indigenous communities are found in all parts of the country, and Indigenous children growing up in Australia come from a wide variety of different backgrounds. Their diverse backgrounds reflect sociocultural and sociolinguistic differences determined not only by family traits, but also by the languages and cultures spoken in their communities. 318
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Children may be raised in an environment where ancestral languages are spoken, often in remote areas where Indigenous languages are a means through which culture is both reflected and learned. These ancestral languages exist in the communities alongside Standard English and more recently developed languages such as creoles and other English dialects like Aboriginal English. As a result, the language ecology of Indigenous Australia, and thus of the children, can be highly complex (see Simpson & Wigglesworth, 2018). Indigenous children may equally be raised in middle class families living in urban or regional contexts where the language spoken at home is standard English or a variety of Aboriginal English. In between these two settings, there are multiple alternatives in terms of linguistic varieties spoken. While to date there is only limited research on Indigenous children’s sociocultural and linguistic development, where it has taken place it has tended to focus on children living in more remote areas, often where ancestral languages continue to be spoken to some extent. Some work has examined how children incorporate the complexities of kinship systems into their sociocultural understanding (e.g. Blythe et al., 2020). Children in all cultural contexts need to learn and understand who the people in their social network are, and how they relate to them. As argued by Blythe et al. (2020), in small communities understanding kin relationships can present a complex and challenging task because an individual may well have a kin relationship with almost every individual in the community. With this may come responsibilities and expectations as well as knowledge as to how to behave and speak to that person. In a detailed study of Murrinhpatha speaking children’s peer-to-peer talk (age 2;10–6;8) over almost two years, Davidson (2018, 2022) showed that while in many ways these children are “‘just’ children, similar to those from other cultural and linguistic backgrounds” (p. 234), the sociolinguistic context of these children – a remote Indigenous community in the far north of Australia – means that their linguistic behaviour is in many ways very different from children elsewhere. This is particularly reflected in their developing understanding of the highly complex kinship terminology of this cultural group within which a range of contrasts (e.g., gender, number, siblinghood) are not fully acquired until adulthood (Blythe et al., 2020). Many Indigenous communities are multilingual, as discussed earlier, and in these sociolinguistic contexts, children are able to draw on the range of repertoires they encounter to express themselves. The few detailed analyses of children’s talk in these contexts show some ways in which children draw on their dynamic repertoires across varying contexts (e.g., Poetsch, 2022; Dixon, 2021; Davidson, 2018) as they develop their sociocultural understandings of the community around them and the different ways of interacting and identifying with their interlocutors. The diversity of First Nations communities means that generalisations about Indigenous children’s linguistic and sociocultural learnings cannot be made. One overarching theme that can be observed, however, is that of kinship. This has been shown to be central to social identification processes across many communities and interactional contexts; it is often reflected in the first conversations people have with each other when they meet and is core to socialisation processes in children.
Conclusion In this chapter, we have given a brief orientation to the body of work on the sociolinguistics of the Australian region. This summary has been grouped under the emergent themes of (i) linguistic variation, regions and social groups; (ii) multilingualism; (iii) language contact and contact languages; and (iv) child language, reflecting major focuses of research endeavour in this area. Although this work covers vast geographical and theoretical terrain, we can observe some common threads in 319
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the journey and some outcomes of sociolinguistic research in the region. Sociolinguistic work has provided a nuanced way to capture aspects of the rapid changes that communities have experienced since colonisation – to the indexicalities of variants, the multilingual repertoires of children and adults and the emergence of new varieties. We now benefit from the existence of many large, rich corpora of Australian languages, and researchers have increasingly moved beyond traditional approaches to explore more contemporary and experimental methodologies and theoretical perspectives, e.g., drawn from third-wave sociolinguistic approaches. Finally, it is encouraging to see recent work engage more fully in genuine community collaboration (e.g., Rodríguez Louro & Collard, 2021) and in serious reckoning with the ‘hegemonic whiteness’ (Hudley et al., 2020) of the field with a view to mitigating the harm and maximising the benefit of language research for Aboriginal communities (Gaby & Woods, 2020).
Acknowledgements The authors wish to acknowledge the central contributions of speakers of many Aboriginal languages to the large body of sociolinguistic work discussed in this chapter. We particularly thank the community members from Warruwi, Yirrkala, Wadeye and Maningrida who have worked together with the authors for many years. This work would not exist without the generosity with which this knowledge has been shared. This knowledge remains the Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property (ICIP) of the respective speech communities.
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27 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN NEW ZEALAND Jennifer Hay and Margaret Maclagan
Introduction New Zealand (NZ) consists of three main islands in the southern Pacific Ocean. Within NZ it is often referred to as Aotearoa-New Zealand, incorporating the Māori name for the country, but this is not currently an official designation. Its nearest neighbour, Australia, is 1600 km to the west. The country was first settled by the Māori, who arrived approximately 1000 years ago. Europeans started to arrive in the late eighteenth century. In 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi established British sovereignty in NZ and following this, immigration of English-speaking colonists increased greatly (see King, 2003 for a general history). English is the most commonly used language in New Zealand and both te reo Māori (the Māori language) and NZ Sign Language are official languages. Māori make up approximately 17% of the population, and are concentrated in the north and east of the North Island. Pacific Islanders make up 8% of the population. There are more in the North Island, with Auckland described as the largest Pacific Island city in the world. The Asian population has risen to 16% with recent immigrants mainly of Chinese and Indian descent.
Sociolinguistics of society: language context and language planning Prior to colonisation by the British, NZ had been home to the Māori for up to 1000 years. Postcolonisation, English became increasingly dominant, partly through educational policies that marginalised the use of te reo Māori (see Benton, 1981), and increasing urbanisation. Between 1930 and 1960, the estimated percentage of Māori children speaking only Māori at home dropped from 97% to 26%, and the language was regarded as endangered (see May & Hill, 2018). Since the early 1980s, a revitalisation movement has pioneered Māori medium education initiatives, and children can now have their entire education, from preschool through to tertiary education, in te reo Māori (King, 2018; Benton, 2015; Rameka & Peterson, 2021). Since about 2010, there has been an attitudinal swing (cf. O’Toole, 2020), with increasing numbers of Māori language learners. Young adults now have greater te reo Māori speaking ability than their parents (Lane, 2020). Viewpoints are changing amongst youth about purist attitudes towards language in the context of ongoing revitalisation (Albury & Carter, 2018). There is also increased use of the language in public broadcasting, 323
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albeit not without some backlash (Daubs, 2021). The NZ government has the goal that by 2040 one million NZers will be able to have a basic conversation in te reo (Te Puni Kōkiri, 2019). Many indigenous peoples see Māori as an example of how endangerment can be reversed, and research on Māori language revitalisation is at the vanguard internationally (May & Hill, 2018). New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) has historically been marginalised. It was granted official language status in the NZSL Act of 2006. According to language vitality and endangerment frameworks, NZSL is still classified as ‘threatened’ (McKee, 2017). The population of Deaf people who use NZSL is estimated at between 2500 and 4000. In the 2018 census, the number who used NZSL was 22,986 but this was still only 0.5% of the population (Stats NZ, n.d.). While theoretically Deaf children can use NZSL as a medium of learning, in practice, access remains variable (McKee, 2017). NZSL is increasingly visible in NZ media, and in political contexts. Surveys of language use patterns suggest that there is influence from other signed languages, with users being protective of the uniqueness of NZSL. However, they do not see external influences as a threat to the language’s vitality. McKee and McKee (2020) analyse how these perspectives coexist within the context of local ideology regarding the identity of NZSL, and variation and change within it. Some Pasifika languages are now predominantly NZ-based (for example, Cook Islands Māori, Tokelauan, Niuean). For other languages, including Samoan and Tongan, the majority of the population is in the wider Pasifika diaspora. Pasifika languages among NZ-born are becoming endangered. Taumoefolau et al. (2002) found a shift from Pasifika languages to English taking place and predicted that this would continue. McFall-McCaffery (2017) found that the percentage of Cook Islands Māori children below school age who could still speak Cook Islands Māori was only 3% and school age children (6–18 years) was 5%. For Niuean, the similar percentages were 5% and 8%. Matika et al. (2021) found that bilingualism increased levels of ethnic identity centrality, and moderated the relationship between this and self-esteem for Pasifika and Māori speakers. For Māori, bilingualism also strengthened the relationship between ethnic identity and overall well-being. Diverse immigration patterns have led the Royal Society of New Zealand to describe NZ as ‘superdiverse’ (Royal Society of New Zealand, 2013), with speakers of more than 160 languages (Statistics NZ, 2014). Nevertheless, the level of monolingualism remains high. Cunningham and King (2018) surveyed teenagers from a range of language backgrounds, and highlighted the variety of tensions which affected the willingness of NZ-born young people to identify with their parents’ ethnicity and use their languages. A well-established research program at Victoria University of Wellington analyses patterns of workplace discourse, and the socio-pragmatics of interaction. This project has published a wide range of papers on identity, discourse and power in the workplace, including work on intercultural communication and skilled migrants in NZ. A comprehensive online bibliography is currently available on the website (www.wgtn.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1880040/LWPallpubs2020.pdf).
Sociolinguistics of language NZ has a vibrant community of researchers working on questions relating to language variation and change, and we focus the majority of this chapter on recent work in this area. We focus our review on the substantial body of recent work documenting variation and change in New Zealand English (NZE), followed by a summary of work in the variation of NZSL and te reo Māori.
Language variation and change: NZ English In the first edition, this chapter outlined a range of corpora which form a particular strength of NZ sociolinguistics. For a description of generalisations about NZE from analyses of these corpora, 324
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see Maclagan and Hay (2010). The strength in corpus building and analysis has continued, with newer statistical techniques and questions applied to the original corpora, and the addition of new corpora. For example, Meyerhoff led a project on English spoken in Auckland, especially in the context of migration into different parts of the city, and of the ethnic composition of different neighbourhoods. This included building a stratified corpus collected across three neighbourhoods (Meyerhoff et al., 2020; Ross et al., 2021). In Christchurch, a large corpus of earthquake stories was collected in 2012 following the Canterbury earthquakes (cf. Clark et al., 2016). In 2020–2021, a longitundinal sample was rerecorded. Speakers retold their stories and recounted what had happened since (Carmichael et al., 2022). Clark has also created a corpus of Southland English (Villarreal et al., 2020, 2021). In the following sections, we outline some of the research findings and variables that have been a particular focus since 2008, many of which use the previously described corpora and/or the described newer corpora.
Origins of NZ English Early work on the Origins of NZ English (ONZE) project was influential in shaping the literature on the formation of NZ English (Gordon et al., 2004; Gordon et al., 2007; Trudgill, 2004). Careful analysis revealed the role of parents in shaping a child’s dialect in the absence of an already-established ‘community dialect’ and the role of the mix of community dialects in shaping the direction of changes (see Gordon et al., 2004). Trudgill (2004) maintained that new dialect formation is largely deterministic and involves no social factors; other authors concluded that social factors were also at play (see, e.g., Gordon et al., 2004; Kerswill, 2010). Mathematical simulations of the evolution of NZE show that pure accommodation-based quantitative mixing alone, without any additional social factors or variable weighting, could not have led to the observed emergence of NZ English (Baxter et al., 2009).
Monophthongs of NZE Early work focused on tracking the evolution of the short front vowels through a vowel shift in which dress and trap raised, and kit centralised (cf. Langstrof, 2006). It was also argued that start (Gordon et al., 2004) and fleece (Maclagan & Hay, 2007) were implicated in the chain-shift. These vowels have continued to receive attention. Hay et al. (2015) extracted F1 and F2 values from the ONZE database, and investigated the degree to which word frequency played a role in the shift. They showed that, for dress, trap and kit, low frequency words led the sound change. They argue that when vowels are being pushed in a sound change, low frequency words can lead because high frequency words are more robust to ambiguity, and so less quick to move out of an area that is acoustically overlapping with another vowel. Villarreal and Clark (2021) focused on inter-vowel priming in the Quakebox corpus. They found that priming occurs across vowels, such that if a speaker produces one vowel a certain way we can predict how they will produce another vowel close to it in the conversation. However, the directions of the relationship appear to be linked to vowel peripherality, rather than innovativeness or conservativeness in the chainshift. Warren (2017) further investigated claims from Maclagan and Hay (2007) that the raising of dress triggers a diphthongisation of fleece. He analysed the NZ Spoken English Database (NZSED, Warren, 2002) finding further raising of dress, and a correlation within speakers between the height of dress and the diphthongisation of fleece, providing further support for the implication of fleece in the ‘short’ front vowel shift. Warren also investigated the relationship between quantity and quality differences for a number of vowel pairs in NZE, finding strong evidence that the relationship between strut and start is solely a quantity difference for NZSED speakers. 325
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The short front vowels have also been a focus of attention for the Auckland Voices project (Watson et al., 2019; Ross et al., 2021) which finds lower and backer productions of dress and trap than reported elsewhere in the country. Watson et al. (2019) and Ross et al. (2021) argue that the short front vowel shift is reversing for Auckland speakers. Rather than targeting a particular monophthong or set of monophthongs, Brand et al. (2021) looked at all NZE monophthongs in the ONZE corpus, for bottom-up evidence of covariation. If a speaker is advanced in one vowel, can we predict how they might pronounce another vowel? They found evidence for three subsystems of interlinked vowels. One was a set of sound changes, including the short front vowel shift, which could broadly distinguish ‘innovative’ from ‘conservative’ speakers. They also found the back vowels were restructuring into a linear organisation, apparently driven by a repulsive relationship between thought and start/strut and that the high front vowels were jostling for the highest front position. The English recordings in the Māori and NZ English database (MAONZE, King et al., 2010) demonstrated changes over time in the NZE nurse vowel (Maclagan et al., 2017).
Diphthongs of NZE The most studied diphthongs in NZE are near and square, which have undergone a well-studied merger (cf Gordon & Maclagan, 2001). Recent work on the dynamic shape of the formant trajectories of these vowels demonstrated a shift from a historically more monophthongal square vowel, towards a much more diphthongal realisation (Gubian et al., 2019). Sóskuthy et al. (2017) auditorily analysed the closing diphthongs in early NZE, showing substantial ‘diphthong shift’, with face and goat changing first, followed by price and mouth. The changes were not independent from each other. Ongoing acoustic analysis of changes in the internal trajectories of these vowels shows significant rearrangements of internal timing, with the F1 maximum moving progressively later in the vowel for price and mouth, apparently as a reaction to encroachment from face and goat (Sóskuthy et al., 2019a, 2019b). The Auckland Voices project has found that patterns of some diphthongs are departing from those reported elsewhere in NZ. Notably, their findings show that the first target of mouth has significantly lowered and backed in a similar fashion to trap. These movements may be related. By contrast, the first target for face has fronted and raised for the same speakers.
NZE consonants Consonantal variation has received less attention than vocalic variation except for the continued focus on rhoticity, and its link with /r/-sandhi phenomena. The most commented-on regional variation within NZE is Southland English (Hay et al., 2008). Recent work has analysed this in the Southland Corpus. A classifier was trained to auto-code the presence or absence of /r/ in a large dataset of speakers (Villarreal et al., 2020). This was then applied to the historical evolution of /r/ in Southland (Villarreal et al., 2021). A surprising discovery was historically different conditioning factors on /r/ realisation for men and women. This, together with an understanding of the historical context, suggests that men and women were essentially operating as separate speech communities, which have converged in more recent generations. Hay et al. (2018) report an analysis of intrusive /r/ (as in banana/r/ and apple) in Southland vs Canterbury, and show that intrusive /r/, while present in Southland, is present at a lower frequency than in (non-rhotic) Canterbury. These lower rates are consistent with the argument in Hay and Sudbury (2005) and elsewhere, that intrusive /r/ evolves as a consequence of the loss of rhoticity, but that both partial-rhoticity and partial-intrusive-r can coexist in the same speakers. While non-Southland 326
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NZ English is historically non-rhotic, work in the north of the North Island is now showing the reemergence of partial rhoticity (Marsden, 2017). Hay and Foulkes (2016) analysed medial /t/, and confirmed it is changing to a voiced flap, with men more likely to produce this variant than women. They show that when speaker age is controlled, words that are more often produced by older speakers (e.g., knitting) are much more conservative than words more often produced by younger speakers (e.g., computer). They also showed that speakers used more innovative variants when talking about recent events than events from the distant past. There is also a rapidly increasing second variant, fricated /t/, which is led by women (Fiasson, 2016). Clark (2018) found significant priming relationships between the medial voiced variant for men, and the voiceless fricated variants for women in the Quakebox corpus.
Pronunciation of particular NZE words Several studies have investigated changes within particular words. Warren et al. (2017) investigated changes in the production of the plural ‘women’, leading to a merger between the singular and plural forms woman/women. The innovative variant appeared as early as speakers born in 1860, and failure to compensate for coarticulation in perception is likely to have driven the change. It was strongly socially stratified, with speakers from lower socio-economic backgrounds driving it. Hashimoto (2019) investigated whether ‘r’ in Māori loanwords in English is adapted to an approximant, or imported as a Māori tap. He found significant speaker variability: speakers with more positive attitudes towards Māori were more likely to produce the tap. More taps were produced when the wider context was relevant to Māori, as opposed to a non-Māori-relevant context. Hay et al. (2012) reported on a change from ‘thee’ to ‘thuh’ (/ði/ to /ðə/) when the word ‘the’ preceded a vowel-initial word. This was led by speakers from a lower socioeconomic background. Meyerhoff et al. (2020) also found a significant change in this variable within all three neighbourhoods of the Auckland Voices project.
Intonation and rhythm NZ English has been reported as more syllable-timed than many other varieties of English (Warren, 1998). Nokes and Hay (2012) investigated changes over the history of NZE and reported that stressed and unstressed vowels are less differentiated by duration in modern NZE than in earlier NZE or other varieties. This may be linked to duration changes associated with the NZE short front vowel shift (cf. Langstrof, 2009). NZ English also has a commonly used high-rising terminal (or ‘uptalk’), observed as early as speakers born in 1874 (Warren, 2016; Warren & Fletcher, 2016). Older speakers use a late rise for both questions and uptalk, but younger speakers use an early rise start for questions, and a later start for uptalk (Fletcher et al., 2005). These can be accurately distinguished by listeners in perception (Warren, 2017). Work on voice quality shows that Māori English speakers use significantly more creaky voice than non-Māori (known as Pākehā) speakers. Listeners were sensitive to this difference in an ethnicity identification task (Szakay, 2012).
Syntax and pragmatics Syntactic and Pragmatic features have received considerably less attention. Bresnan and Hay (2008) investigated factors underpinning the dative alternation in NZE, as compared to American 327
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English. They found that the behaviour of ‘give’ phrases (i.e., preferences for ‘I gave the man a dog’ vs ‘I gave a dog to the man’) changed over the history of NZE, and that NZE shows increased sensitivity to animacy compared to US English. Hundt (Leech et al., 2009) argues that NZers are more likely than Australian or British English speakers to use the progressive and its passive variant with an inanimate subject. Further work on the genitive alternation and on possessive constructions indicated that this sensitivity to animacy dated back to early NZE (Hundt & Szmrecsanyi, 2012). However, work analysing the genitive and dative in four varieties of English did not find robust overall animacy differences (Szmrecsanyi et al., 2017). Rather it found slightly different constraints, with NZE appearing to be more sensitive to a final sibilant in a genitive phrase. Bresnan (2021) conducted a fine-grained study of properties influencing auxiliary contraction in contemporary NZE, and showed that younger speakers and ‘non-professional’ speakers showed greater rates of contraction. D’Arcy (2012) outlined the ‘diachrony of quotation’ in the ONZE corpus, looking at the evolution of ‘say’ through ‘think’, ‘go’ and ‘be like’ to a zero marker, with ‘be like’ showing a sharp uptake in usage in the more contemporary data. She also documented variation between Māori and Pākeha in the use of verbs of quotation (D’Arcy, 2010).
Language variation and change: New Zealand sign language The focus of research on New Zealand Sign Language in NZ is the Deaf Studies Research Unit at the University of Victoria, Wellington. In addition to extensive documentation work, the group has built a stratified sociolinguistic corpus of NZSL. They point out that the community of signers in NZ does not have a significant range of class differentiation because the majority of NZSL users have levels of academic achievement below the general population and consequently a very small proportion are employed in white collar or professional occupations (Schembri et al., 2009). Schembri et al. (2009) investigated the variable of location in a class of signs represented by think, name and clever. These are canonically signed above the eyebrow ridge, but can be produced lower. The variation was conditioned by a range of linguistic factors, but also by social factors of gender, region, ethnicity and language acquisition background. The strongest predictor was region, with signers from the two largest urban communities more likely to use non-canonical forms. The non-canonical form was also favoured by females, Pākeha and native signers. McKee and McKee (2011) investigated variation in NZSL signs for numerals, reporting social factors of region, gender and particularly age. Age and ethnicity have also been found to be significant predictors of rates of variable subject expression, with middle-aged and Pākeha signers somewhat more likely to drop subject noun phrases (McKee et al, 2011). Signs are more diversified among younger signers than older signers (McKee et al., 2021). Survey work on attitudes towards and perceptions of NZSL by users, reinforces ongoing change, with a strong belief that the language of younger signers differs from that used by older signers (McKee & McKee, 2020).
Language variation and change: te reo Māori The Māori and NZ English research group confirmed that women led sound changes in te reo Māori (Maclagan et al., 2013) and that changes in English affected the pronunciation of Māori vowels (Watson et al., 2016). In spite of change over time in the English rhythm of Māori speakers (Vowell et al., 2015), listeners could perceive the difference between passages in stress-timed NZ English and mora-timed Māori English when the stimuli were low pass filtered to remove all content cues (Watson 328
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et al., 2011). All listeners could make this distinction, but Māori listeners who were more involved in a Māori community were more accurate (Szakay, 2008). The effects of the inter-generational interruption in the transmission of the Māori language could be seen in changes to the rules governing the particle ka (Harlow et al., 2011). An examination of pronunciation differences between spoken and read texts in the Māori language did not find the changes associated with prestige norms in English, leading the group to question whether contrasting spoken and read texts was a viable methodology for indigenous languages like te reo Māori (King et al., 2020).
Conclusion In this short overview we have tried to give a general picture of recent sociolinguistic work in NZ. Unfortunately, space limitations have prevented us from being comprehensive, and we have focused on work within language variation and change. The very fact that we could not be comprehensive reflects the ongoing vibrancy of sociolinguistics in NZ. The legacy started by a generation of outstanding sociolinguistic scholars is well-served by a new vibrant community of young scholars who continue to stand on their shoulders, and to analyse and contribute to the substantial sociolinguistic resources and insights built within NZ over the last few decades.
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28 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN THE PACIFIC Eleanor Ridge, Sally Akevai Nicholas and Richard Benton
Introduction This chapter focuses on the sociolinguistics of the Pacific, which we define as the region delineated by the migration of speakers of Austronesian, mostly Oceanic, languages starting in the Bismarck Archipelago and along the coast of Northern New Guinea about 5000 years ago and moving West, South and North across the Pacific. Languages from Papuan language families are spoken in parts of this region too, and they may have been spoken over wider areas historically. This region has had a long and complex history of colonisation by groups from Europe, Asia and the Americas. The consequences of genocide, spread of disease, supply of weapons, warfare, removal and importation of people, and alienation and degradation of land and water have all affected the sociolinguistic landscape of the contemporary Pacific. Colonial and postcolonial language policies in education, as well as economic incentives for migration and language shift have also threatened the maintenance of Indigenous languages and traditional multilingual systems. Despite these shared experiences, it is difficult to make generalisations about the sociolinguistics of the Pacific because there are very different patterns in language use in different parts of the region. This chapter will give an overview of research into sociolinguistic practices in four broadly delineated sub-regions, both before and since colonisation: Island Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia and Fiji. The first three of these terms have a problematic history. Though partly based on geographic and linguistic evidence, they were largely motivated by European colonisers’ application of theories of race to local populations (Tcherkézoff, 2003). Fiji is on the boundary between Melanesia and Polynesia, and is discussed separately in this chapter to reflect its unique sociolinguistic situation. We will then draw together studies on contemporary language use in education in this region, demonstrating how colonial language ideologies persist and are resisted in the Pacific. There is a growing body of documentation of the languages and sociolinguistic contexts of this region, though many languages, language groups and contexts remain understudied, especially from a sociolinguistic perspective. Where necessary, we will therefore also draw on relevant research from adjacent fields such as language documentation and description, linguistic anthropology, historical linguistics, anthropology, archaeology and education. 333
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Island Melanesia: Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia Although nearly all languages spoken in Island Melanesia are Oceanic, there is linguistic, archaeological, anthropological and genetic evidence for contact with speakers of Papuan languages throughout the region, although the exact nature of this contact and related patterns of migration are contested (Bedford et al., 2018; Lipson et al., 2018, 2020; Posth et al., 2018; Terrill, 2011). The influence from Papuan languages accounts for many of the distinctive linguistic features of Austronesian languages in the wider linguistic area of Melanesia (including Papua), which are maintained by chained language contact (Geraghty, 2017; Schapper, 2020). Contact with speakers of the Polynesian Outlier languages in this region within the last 1000 years has also had sociolinguistic influences in both directions (Flexner et al., 2019; Hermann & Walworth, 2020). Before European colonisation, Island Melanesia was characterised by extreme linguistic diversity supported by small-scale multilingualism (i.e. balanced, egalitarian, reciprocal or Indigenous multilingualism, cf. Lüpke, 2016; Pakendorf et al., 2021). The sociolinguistic practice of smallscale multilingualism accounts for the high levels of linguistic diversity maintained to this day across the region, with mutually unintelligible languages spoken by small groups of a few hundred speakers (François et al., 2015; Jourdan, 2010; Bissoonauth & Parish, 2017). The high number of distinct languages per capita belies the structural similarities between languages spoken over wide areas. François (2011, 2012) describes extreme lexical diversification combined with structural homogeneity among 17 languages spoken by less than 10,000 speakers in Northern Vanuatu. He suggests that the apparent contradiction can be accounted for by a combination of intense contact between groups along with a shared ideology that prizes linguistic differentiation as an expression of group identity. Walworth et al. (2021) present three case studies of contemporary small-scale multilingualism in different areas of Vanuatu, exploring how factors such as language attitudes, marriage practices and migration histories result in a diversity of multilingual practices even between adjacent villages. Based partly on this linguistic evidence, pre-colonial Melanesia is believed to have been organised into relatively small and egalitarian social groupings, with leadership based on social influence and displays of wealth, rather than inheritance of hierarchical positions. These so-called Big Man social structures placed great importance on leaders’ linguistic resources, including oratory, naming practices, secret languages and opaque song lyrics, especially as required rituals within grade-taking ceremonies associated with secret societies (Lindstrom, 1990; François & Stern, 2013). This system relies on conversational practices ensuring the reciprocal consent and involvement of the wider social group, which has been theorised as a framework for contemporary research and engagement in Melanesian communities under the label Tok Stori (Sanga & Reynolds, 2019, 2021). The Big Man social structure may have developed as a response to depopulation caused by European colonisation, rather than a continuation of historical social structures, which may have more similarity to hierarchical traditions in Polynesia or Micronesia (Spriggs, 2008). Since at least the nineteenth century, this region has continuously experienced colonial extraction of both resources and people, most conspicuously through the trade in indentured labourers for plantations in Australia, Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia, known as ‘blackbirding’. These plantations were the context for the expansion of a maritime pidgin used by traders in the area, encompassed by the umbrella term Melanesian Pidgin English (MPE). Those who returned spread this shared contact language to their homelands, forming the basis for the national creoles Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Bislama in Vanuatu and Pijin in Solomon Islands (Crowley, 1990; Jourdan, 2013; Sankoff, 2021). Despite their shared origin, these languages have different political statuses in Vanuatu, where Bislama is the official national language, and Solomon Islands, where it is not recognised in the constitution and is rarely 334
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used in written form. Both are subject to diverse and often contradictory language ideologies, viewed with suspicion as a colonial imposition or a substandard variety of English, or celebrated as a shared national language associated with resistance to colonisation and pan-regional pride (Jarraud-Leblanc, 2013; Jourdan & Angeli, 2014, 2021). These creoles are the main competitor to Indigenous languages in this region today, with many children in urban areas growing up speaking Bislama or Pijin as their first or only language (François et al., 2015; Hicks, 2017; Jourdan, 2010). The arrival of European colonisers and colonial ideologies within this region also disrupted local language ecologies. Missionaries’ often arbitrary decisions about where to establish missions, and which languages to preach, write and educate in, disrupted local patterns of small-scale multilingualism, and often triggered language shift away from other languages spoken in the area (Boswell, 2019; Crowley, 2001; Jourdan, 2010; McDougall, 2012). In New Caledonia, migration to a mission centre led to the development of a French-lexifier creole Tayo (Bissoonauth, 2018). Rivalry between French and Anglophone traders in the region eventually led to official colonisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, introducing arbitrary national borders between British-administered Solomon Islands, French-administered New Caledonia and the jointadministered New Hebrides, which would become Vanuatu upon independence in 1980. As these colonies gradually formalised the national education systems, acquisition of English and French was heavily incentivised and often enforced with disciplinary measures (Bissoonauth & Parish, 2017; Vandeputte-Tavo, 2013; Vernaudon, 2015). The continued use of residential schooling means that intergenerational transmission of Indigenous languages is interrupted through children spending key years away from their own language communities (McDougall, 2012; Vernaudon, 2015). Unlike Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, New Caledonia is and remains a settler colony. Since establishing a penal colony in 1853, France has encouraged the immigration of French settlers to outnumber the Indigenous Kanak population, especially in response to late-twentieth-century Kanak-led independence movements. The continued presence of a local French population and French system of government makes maintenance of Indigenous languages and linguistic practices even more difficult, and state interventions aiming to support local languages and cultures have had mixed results (Bissoonauth & Parish, 2017; Dotte et al., 2017; Vernaudon, 2015). Two studies which focus on Indigenous experiences are Sallabank’s (2015) study of language attitudes in the Pweevo community in Northern Province, and Bihan-Gallic’s (2021) exploration of how Indigenous leaders perceive the enforcement of French linguistic hegemony. The extreme linguistic diversity in this region is threatened by colonial policies and global capitalism, so documentation of Indigenous languages has been a major priority. Increasingly linguists working in documentation have responded to calls to pay closer attention to the wider sociolinguistic context and sociolinguistic variation (Meyerhoff, 2017, 2019). This has included assessment of linguistic vitality within a language community’s wider context (Boerger et al., 2012; Rangelov et al., 2019), case studies of sociolinguistic variation within language communities (Duhamel, 2020a; Ridge, 2019), variation in argument marking (Meyerhoff, 2015; Ridge, 2022; Schnell & Barth, 2018) and a number of studies on borrowing or code-switching from regional contact languages (Budd, 2011; Duhamel, 2020a, 2020b; Guérin & Alvanoudi, 2022; Meyerhoff, 2014).
Micronesia Micronesia was populated from West to East by speakers of the earliest offshoots of the Oceanic subgroup and other Austronesian languages, such as Chamorro. This region is more genealogically heterogeneous than Island Melanesia, though that picture is complicated by dense networks of language contact. There is mixed evidence for a Western Micronesia linguistic area (Grant, 2017). 335
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Polynesian outlier groups subsequently settled lands which are now in the Federated States of Micronesia (Drummond & Rudolph, 2021). Pre-colonial Micronesia was characterised by dense patterns of contact over long distances made possible by advanced maritime technology and navigational knowledge (Puas, 2021; ch. 2). Language contact situations would arise through trading, ritual exchange and relocation in response to natural disasters. This is reflected linguistically in dialect chains over large areas, with mutually intelligible varieties spoken between adjacent areas, but lack of intelligibility between more distant varieties. Ellis (2007) describes how the dialect chain of the Trukic group is complicated by the cultivated skill of ‘language bending’, where speakers deliberately accommodate their speech to achieve intelligibility with speakers of more distant varieties. These complex patterns of linguistic contact between speakers of mutually intelligible and unintelligible varieties have led to the emergence of contact languages that defy easy categorisation as koines or creoles, especially when less closely related and colonial languages are also involved (e.g. Ellis, 2016 on Saipan Carolinian; Hudson, 2019 on Mixed Language in Palau; Tryon, 2001 on Ngatikese Men’s Language). Hudson (2016, 2019) explains these processes of language coalescence as a form of identity creation. Many contact languages are the result of migration in response to natural disasters, depopulation due to colonisation and genocide, movement to colonial population centres and climate change. Micronesian social and linguistic practices have been maintained and adapted in the face of long and complex histories of colonisation, by European powers, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the USA (Puas, 2021, ch. 3). Initial contact with Spanish colonisers began in the 1500s, before the Spanish formally colonised Guam in the 1600s. This was followed by waves of colonisation by Germany, Japan and the USA, with territories changing hands as a result of wars between the colonisers. These waves of colonisation and recolonisation often resulted in mass relocations resulting from warfare, and nuclear weapons testing in the second half of the twentieth century. Progress towards independence has been delayed and constrained by the military strategic priorities of the colonisers, with many regions remaining in ‘free association’ with the USA and heavily constrained by military contracts. Research on contemporary sociolinguistic contexts in Micronesia has explored language attitudes and multilingualism from many perspectives. Rentz (2018) is a detailed exploration of language attitudes in Pohnpei. Day (2017) looks at Indigenous experiences of US military language policy in Guam. Santos Bamba (2013) gives a multigenerational account of women’s attitudes to English and Chamorro, while Kai and Bevacqua (2021) focus on children’s attitudes to Chamorro language revitalisation. Buchstaller and Alvanides (2017) document the written language landscape of the Marshall Islands, and Berman (2014) shows how Marshallese childhood is sociolinguistically constructed and negotiated. Matsumoto (2020) charts developments in attitudes to multilingualism in Palau over two decades, while Matsumoto and Britain (2019) compare language contact with different coloniser languages through food-related borrowings in Palauan. Okamura (2021) explores language maintenance of Nauruan and Nauru Pidgin English. Sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies have explored the development of regional varieties of English, such as Guam English (Kuske, 2019), Palauan English (Britain & Matsumoto, 2015) and Marshallese English (Buchstaller & Willson, 2018; Buchstaller, 2020). Matsumoto and Britain (2022) also describe the emergence of a distinctive variety of Japanese in Palau. Other sociolinguistic studies have explored the experiences of Micronesian diaspora communities, especially in the USA and Hawai’i. Schwartz (2017) reports on a forum for Marshallese language activists in Arkansas, exploring language attitudes and revitalisation priorities including discussion of purism and orthographic decisions. Research in Hawai’i has explored experiences of anti-Micronesian discrimination, including racist discourses in journalism (Saft, 2021), and racism 336
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in ESL classrooms (Talmy, 2010), as well as language ideologies in Chuukese and Marshallese community initiatives to maintain their languages and cultures (Uchishiba, 2018). Researchers working in Micronesia have also contributed to methodological reflections on research in language documentation and reclamation. Thomas (2022) explores how common practices in language documentation fieldwork can reinforce colonial language ideologies, while Odango (2015a, ch. 8) reflects on elicitation, a central methodology of documentation, through a detailed ethnography. Odango (2015b) foregrounds Micronesian youth perspectives on language reclamation to redress the absence of young people’s voices in much of the academic literature.
Polynesia The geographic region of Polynesia covers the East Pacific Ocean from Aotearoa/New Zealand in the South, Rapanui/Easter Island in the East and the Hawaiian archipelago in the North. The Indigenous peoples of this region endure a range of colonial experiences which shape particular sociolinguistic outcomes as they relate to language maintenance and domains of language use. The Polynesian language family is linguistically coherent and comprises all the Indigenous languages of Triangle Polynesia along with several so-called Polynesian Outlier languages spoken outside the triangle. In contrast with the highly multilingual nature of the rest of Oceania, precolonial Polynesian languages tended to follow a one language per island pattern. This was however accompanied by ongoing language contact between different Polynesian and Fijian groups so there are pre-colonial contact effects present in many Polynesian languages (cf. Charpentier & François, 2015; Walworth, 2014; Sperlich, 2004). In this section we leave a fuller discussion of Māori to our colleagues in their chapter on Sociolinguistics in New Zealand. Language use in the contemporary Pacific varies depending on the political status of the particular language community and the dominant colonial language of that context. English is the most widespread colonial language but French (in French Polynesia) and Spanish (in Rapanui) are also present. In Hawai’i and the Realm of New Zealand (which includes the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau, constitutionally states in free association with New Zealand and whose people are entitled to New Zealand citizenship), English is hegemonically dominant and the Indigenous peoples there have a language revitalisation focus. In the independent nations of the New Zealandsphere, the parts of Polynesia that have been politically or closely connected to modern day New Zealand, English is present and steadily encroaching. In Tonga and Samoa it is likely that most children still acquire the local Indigenous language early, and there are still some older people who are monolingual or highly dominant in the local language. In more urban areas like Apia (Samoa) or Nuku’alofa (Tonga), English is also widely spoken both by Indigenous people and migrant populations. According to the 2018 New Zealand Census, for example, there were 182,721 residents of Samoan ethnicity in that country, 101,937 of whom reportedly spoke Samoan (a relatively high retention rate for an immigrant community); the population of Samoa was 194,320 in 2016. The population of the Cook Islands in 2016 was 17,459; at the 2018 Census 80,532 New Zealand residents were of Cook Island ethnicity, but only 7,833 were reported as speaking Cook Islands Māori. Indigenous languages of the Realm of New Zealand tend to experience more language maintenance challenges. The more constitutionally, socially and economically connected the language community is to New Zealand, the more people have shifted towards English, both in the Aotearoabased population, and those populations still in the homelands. This contrasts with the relatively high vitality (still with some shift to English) of Samoan and Tongan both in the Aotearoa populations and in the homelands – where those languages are dominant (Nicholas, 2018). 337
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There are some interesting similarities between French Polynesia and the Cook Islands, both of which encompass many islands, each with their own linguistic identity, spread across vast distances. In both polities the level of shift away from the local varieties increases the more connected a language group is to the modern economic centre. Tahitian in French Polynesia and Rarotongan in the Cook Islands can function like an H form in a diglossic relationship with the local variety in each place. This is largely due to the arbitrary choices of missionaries during the development of writing systems, and there is now some pushback occurring in both places, such that educational materials (and similar works) are increasingly likely to be produced in the local variety. The other parallel is the sustained shift towards the colonial language which is very advanced in the main centres and accelerating in the regional areas in both locations (Charpentier & François, 2015; Nicholas, 2018). In the eastern corner of the triangle, the Rapa Nui language is threatened in the manner of other Polynesian languages in settler colonial contexts and has the distinction of being the only Polynesian language in the Hispanosphere. Since at least the 1980s, children in Rapa Nui have been increasingly monolingual in Spanish. As elsewhere in occupied Polynesia, revitalisation efforts are underway. The Hawaiian archipelago in the north has been a state of the United States since 1959 (following the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by American settlers and citizens in 1893 and annexation by the U.S. in 1898). English is the dominant language in most domains. The Indigenous Hawaiian language is in a similar position to Māori in New Zealand with a strong revitalisation movement in the face of decades of exclusion of the Indigenous language from formal education and much of the public domain by the governing authorities (cf. Saft, 2021 for an overview of the current linguistic context). In terms of sociolinguistic variation, one salient feature in both Samoan and Tongan is the existence of formal registers that are systematically different from those of everyday speech. In Tongan this manifests as a special register used for communicating with prestigious community members (Taumoefolau, 2012; Haugen & Philips, 2010; Philips, 2007). In Samoan there is a phonological distinction speakers use in various formal contexts (Mosel & Hovdhaugen, 1992; Ballard & Farao, 2008). Following the one language per island metric, both French Polynesia and the Cook Islands have significant linguistic diversity within the Indigenous languages. There is a growing body of literature on language variation within the Indigenous languages in this region (e.g. Charpentier & François, 2015; Nicholas, 2018; Nicholas & Coto-Solano, 2019). There is notable Tahitian borrowing in the lexicon of Rapa Nui due to a period of contact with Tahitian in early colonial times (Kievit, 2017). There is also work on a range of sociolinguistic matters in Rapa Nui including the identity formation with respect to language choice and variation (Makihara, 2004, 2005b, 2005a, 2010, 2013). There is of course interesting variation within the colonial languages spoken in the region. There is some coverage of variation in English (Biewer, 2015; Hendery, 2012, 2015) but this is an area that needs more careful attention. One problem in the literature is that it is often assumed that the speakers are second language speakers, when that is increasingly unlikely with more and more children in the region learning English (or French) as their first language. Pacific varieties of English and French are often maligned by speakers of more prestigious varieties in an example of the ongoing violence of colonisation in the region (cf. de Bres & Nicholas, 2021).
Fiji Fiji sits in the border oceans between Triangle Polynesia and Melanesia. It is the most populous tropical polity in the region with a population of approximately a million. The linguistic landscape is complex. There are three official languages: Fijian (Bauan variety), Fijian Hindi (Fiji Bhat) 338
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and English. The Fijian varieties are spoken by most iTaukei (Indigenous Ethnic Fijian) children. Fijian has a primary division between East Fijian and West Fijian, which are categorised as distinct languages by most linguists (Pawley & Sayaba, 1971; Geraghty, 1983). The Bauan variety of East Fijian has become the standardised variety of Fijian. Rotuman is the third Indigenous language of Fiji. It is the language of the island of Rotuma and its surrounding islets, located 600 kilometres north west of Viti Levu. Both East and West Fijian along with Rotuman and the entire Polynesian subgroup are part of the Central Pacific subgroup of Oceanic languages (Ross et al., 2008). Fiji, especially the largest urban centre Suva, is very multicultural and a range of migrant languages are used including Chinese varieties as well as many languages of Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. Harris et al. (2020) describe widespread bi/multilingualism whereby most children acquire both their family language and English. English is dominant in the public sphere, including education, while home language use favours the vernacular or family language(s). Mugler and Tent (1998) have an earlier detailed sociolinguistic survey of language use and attitudes in Fiji which found a similar picture. The status of Rotuman is more marginalised, and Rotuman communities are establishing revitalisation programs in response to decreasing vitality caused mostly by urbanisation and an associated shift to both Fijian and English (Willans, 2020; Crocombe et al., 2022). Both Fiji proper and Rotuma had much historical contact with Polynesian speakers so there are notable contact effects, especially lexical borrowing (Pawley & Sayaba, 1971; Schmidt, 2003; Fimone, 2020).
Contemporary approaches to education As national education systems were formalised during the twentieth century, colonial language policies promoted coloniser languages at the expense of local languages, and punished use of other languages within the school system. These deliberate policies constrained Indigenous languages to domestic and less formal domains, disrupted intergenerational transmission and caused language trauma for generations of Indigenous people across the Pacific (Jourdan, 2013; McDougall & Zobule, 2021). Language use within education is therefore an important site for supporting Indigenous languages in the region. Many colonial language policies, practices and ideologies in education have persisted since Independence across the Pacific. The maintenance of submersion models or early transition to colonial languages is often justified as a pragmatic response to multilingualism, international language hierarchies, and to avoid a major overhaul of educational infrastructure (Jourdan & Salaün, 2013; Vandeputte-Tavo, 2013). In practice, students and teachers have always drawn on multilingual resources in the classroom, regardless of official policy (Mangubhai, 2002; Tanangada, 2013; Vandeputte-Tavo, 2013; Willans, 2011, 2017a). Today most countries in the region follow a language policy of transitional bilingualism in formal education, so that children begin their education in an Indigenous language or familiar national language, before transitioning to coloniser languages (Mangubhai, 2002; Low et al., 2005; Bianco, 2015). There is a need for more detailed case studies of how these policies are applied and experienced in different contexts across the region (Willans, 2019). A good example is Harris et al.’s (2020) exploration of children’s experiences of acquiring multilingual literacy in three contexts in Fiji, situated within their wider communities and national and regional policy frameworks. Polynesian countries tend to have later-transition models than elsewhere in the region, with transition to majority English or French teaching only happening at a secondary level (Bianco, 2015). The notable exceptions are the Cook Islands (Nicholas, 2018) and Niue (B. Tongia, personal communication, May 13, 2020) where for most children all schooling is English 339
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medium, and Rapa Nui where an immersion programme has been introduced in early primary school education with the goal of revitalising the local language (Makihara, 2013). Melanesian countries face greater challenges in producing materials and curricula for highly multilingual communities (Daly & Barbour, 2021) and have only relatively recently moved away from colonial submersion models into early exit transitional models where Indigenous languages are only used in the first few years of formal schooling (Jourdan, 2013; Salaün, 2013; Willans, 2017a). The question of whether and when to use the national contact languages Pijin and Bislama has been especially divisive, reflecting the legacy of colonial language attitudes (Jourdan, 2013; Vandeputte-Tavo, 2013; Willans, 2017b). In parts of Micronesia with close links to the USA and longstanding patterns of migration to English-speaking countries in response to nuclear testing and climate change, official policies supporting initial use of Indigenous languages can be sidelined by the perceived urgency of acquiring English (Low et al., 2005; Kai & Bevacqua, 2021). Teaching of Indigenous languages at a tertiary level is also increasing across the region, partly to support developments in primary and secondary education. This includes language acquisition classes aimed at heritage learners, like in Hawai’i (Snyder-Frey, 2013), as well as courses aimed at training speakers in linguistic analysis, pedagogy and materials development, such as new programmes in Cook Islands Māori, Tongan and Niuafo-ou, Vagahau Niue and Vanuatu languages at the University of the South Pacific (Willans, 2020; Crocombe et al., 2022). Interesting developments in Indigenous language education have also happened outside of national education systems, away from the pressures exerted by international donors’ policies and timeframes. McDougall and Zobule (2021) chart the progress of the Kulu Language Institute in the Solomon Islands. Founded by Zobule in the 1990s, the institute has been teaching literacy and linguistics in the Kubokota and Luqa languages spoken on Ranongga Island. The project has required patience and persistence to produce a curriculum and materials that are always evolving in response to learner feedback, developing a grammatical metalanguage based on culturally specific metaphors. Zobule argues that the most difficult and greatest achievement has been shifting community attitudes to their own languages. While success in formal education has never been the primary purpose of the Institute, students have seen greatly improved outcomes in formal education too. A major issue in the implementation of Indigenous language education is the question of what variety of a language to teach, a choice that is reinforced by standardisation of orthography for printed materials. Efforts to valorise the Indigenous language often invoke ideologies of linguistic purity: reinforcing boundaries between language varieties, rejecting language mixing especially with colonial languages, and privileging older generations’ varieties, and ultimately reproducing colonial language ideologies that privilege monolingualism (Riley, 2007). These discourses can alienate and demotivate young people whose engagement is vital to the success of language maintenance or revitalisation efforts. Examples of prescriptive standards enforced on young speakers have been observed in contexts across the region, especially when reinforced by colonial institutions (e.g. Dotte et al., 2017; Hudson, 2019; McDougall, 2012). On the other hand, communities in the region have flexibly engaged with discourses of purism and authenticity to support language revitalisation and wider decolonial projects. Makihara (2010) observes the use of syncretic and puristic speech styles in Rapa Nui to achieve different rhetorical effects in political discourse. Snyder-Frey (2013) shows how students reclaiming Hawaiian deploy flexible understandings of authenticity, while prioritising the concept of kuleana – right and responsibility – to understand their role in language revitalisation efforts. 340
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Next steps We finish this chapter by highlighting some additional topics that we think will be important to the development of our understanding of language use in this region, especially where they have been understudied in the existing sociolinguistics literature. There is a great need for documentation of the linguistic practices of deaf people and their communities across the Pacific (Woodward, 2018). The evidence from existing documentation suggests that Indigenous sign language use appears to have been restricted to home signs and village signs used by deaf people, their families and immediate community groups, without much longterm continuity or dispersal over wider regions. Possible exceptions are Hawai’i Sign Language and Majuro Sign Language in the Marshall Islands (Woodward, 2018). With the introduction of formal national schooling, many deaf and other disabled people have been educated via specialist residential institutions, and national sign languages have emerged in these contexts. The lexicon of these deaf community sign languages are strongly influenced by the medium used for teaching in these institutions – usually majority sign languages of colonising nations (Auslan, New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL), American Sign Language (ASL)), or sign systems based on spoken languages (Australasian Signed English). The emerging regional sign languages are also influenced by home and village signs, and regional spoken languages and gestural conventions. Reed and Rumsey (2020) give an overview of research on sign languages in the Solomon Islands, including the emergence of a national deaf community sign language, Solomon Islands Sign Language (SISL), and documentation of the linguistic practices of a deaf man, Kangobai, and his community on Rennell Island in the 1970s (Kuschel, 1973). Sano (2022) describes some examples of regional and ethnic lexical variation in Fiji Sign Language. Iseli (2018) is an initial sociolinguistic survey of home signs used by deaf people in Vanuatu. This research is essential to supporting access for deaf people and other sign language users across the region, where the availability and quality of interpreting services is highly variable (McKee et al., 2019; Murray & Rokotuibau, 2011; Nelson et al., 2009). Another line of research that would further our understanding of the sociolinguistics of this region is a closer examination of language ideologies and mutual intelligibility of varieties classified as the same language. Despite the use of intelligibility as a test for distinguishing languages and enumerating the linguistic diversity of this region, we have relatively few detailed case studies of how intelligibility plays out in highly multilingual contexts, or communities’ perceptions of regional variation. This area is especially likely to be neglected as endangered dialects are seen as lower priority for documentation than language varieties that are categorised as separate languages. An exception is the detailed documentation of asymmetrical intelligibility between Suru Kavian dialect of Apma and other language varieties in Central Pentecost Island, Vanuatu (Gooskens & Schneider, 2016, 2019; Schneider, 2018; Schneider & Gray, 2015; Schneider & Gooskens, 2017). Ellis (2007) identifies language bending as a linguistic practice to increase intelligibility between distant members of a dialect chain in Micronesia – it is hoped that this and similar practices can be documented in more detail in other regions of the Pacific. Many aspects of Pacific people’s experiences of colonialism warrant further investigation of their sociolinguistic implications. Especially for those Pacific countries in Polynesia and Micronesia where a greater part of the population lives in the diaspora, there is a need for more research in homeland contexts to augment the work done in diaspora contexts. This is also needed for speech communities divided by international boundaries. Language planners and advocates in American and independent Samoa, for example, have become concerned about the potential development of divergent languages as a result of the political separation, differences in educational policies and 341
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the large diaspora in Aotearoa and the United States, many of whose members and their families make frequent or sporadic visits to their ethnic homeland. The experiences of Pacific people as speakers of colonial languages is another area that requires further study, including stigma around Pacific varieties, to complement work on the emergence of Pacific varieties of colonial languages (Biewer, 2015), and language ideologies underlying national policies around colonial languages (Abongdia & Willans, 2014). Pacific people’s engagement with international cultural phenomena beyond their colonisers’ cultural spheres, and participation in global Indigenous networks also requires research. Levisen’s (2017) exploration of reggae in Vanuatu and Schwartz’s work on the development of Marshallese song in response to United States nuclear policy (2021) are good examples. Environmental degradation, rising sea levels and more frequent and severe weather events are some of the greatest challenges facing this region today, both as a result of the flow-on from colonial and colonisers’ policies and injustices in the global economy. Sociolinguistic approaches to ideologies about and consequences of climate change will be increasingly important, such as the responses of the Marshallese diaspora to climate change and migration collected by Schwartz (2017). The Pacific is a site of extraordinary, ever-evolving linguistic diversity, and the people of this region continue to expertly navigate their linguistic identities in the face of both ongoing colonial pressures and the fraught processes of decolonisation.
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Sociolinguistics in the Pacific Lüpke, F. (2016). Uncovering small-scale multilingualism. Critical Multilingualism Studies, 4(2), 35–74. Makihara, M. (2004). Linguistic syncretism and language ideologies: Transforming sociolinguistic hierarchy on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). American Anthropologist, 106(3), 529–540. Makihara, M. (2005a). Rapa Nui ways of speaking Spanish: Language shift and socialization on Easter Island. Language in Society, 34(5), 727–762. Makihara, M. (2005b). Being Rapa Nui, speaking Spanish: Children’s voices on Easter Island. Anthropological Theory, 5(2), 117–134. Makihara, M. (2010). Linguistic purism in Rapa Nui political discourse. In M. Makihara & B. B. Schieffelin (Eds.), Consequences of contact: Language ideologies and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies (pp. 49–69). Oxford University Press. Makihara, M. (2013). Language, competence, use, ideology, and community on Rapa Nui. Language & Communication, 33(4A), 439–449. Mangubhai, F. (2002). Language-in-education policies in the South Pacific: Some possibilities for consideration. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 23(6), 490–511. Matsumoto, K. (2020). A restudy of postcolonial Palau after two decades: Changing views on multilingualism in the Pacific. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 30(1–2), 34–59. Matsumoto, K., & Britain, D. (2019). Pancakes stuffed with sweet bean paste: Food-related lexical borrowings as indicators of the intensity of language contact in the Pacific. In Food across cultures (pp. 127–167). Palgrave Macmillan. Matsumoto, K., & Britain, D. (2022). The vernacularity of Palauan Japanese. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 273, 103–144. McDougall, D. (2012). Stealing foreign words, recovering local treasures: Bible translation and vernacular literacy on Ranongga (Solomon Islands). The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 23(3), 318–339. McDougall, D., & Zobule, A. G. (2021). “All read well”: Schooling on solid ground in a Solomon Islands language movement. The Contemporary Pacific, 33(2), 410–439. McKee, R., Iseli, J., & Murray, A. (2019). Sign language interpreting in the Pacific: A snapshot of progress in raising the participation of deaf people. Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, 7(2), 185–196. Meyerhoff, M. (2014). Borrowing in apparent time: With some comments on attitudes and universals. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 20(2), 121–128. Meyerhoff, M. (2015). Turning variation on its head: Analysing subject prefixes in Nkep (Vanuatu) for language documentation. Asia-Pacific Language Variation, 1(1), 78–108. Meyerhoff, M. (2017). Writing a linguistic symphony: Analyzing variation while doing language documentation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 62(4), 525–549. Meyerhoff, M. (2019). Unnatural bedfellows? The sociolinguistic analysis of variation and language documentation. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 49(2), 229–241. Mosel, U., & Hovdhaugen, E. (1992). Samoan reference grammar. Scandinavian University Press. Mugler, F., & Tent, J. (1998). Some aspects of language use and attitudes in Fiji. In SICOL: Proceedings of the second international conference on oceanic linguistics (Vol. 1, pp. 109–134). Pacific Linguistics, Australian National University. Murray, A., & Rokotuibau, J. (2011). Working together to support the Solomon Islands: An emerging Deaf and interpreting community. In B. Costello, M. Thumann, & R. Shaw (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th conference of the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters (pp. 12–23). World Association of Sign Language Interpreters. Nelson, K., Tawaketini, I., Spencer, R., & Goswell, D. (2009). Isa Lei: Interpreter training in Fiji. In J. Napier (Ed.), International perspectives on sign language interpreter education (pp. 171–189). Gallaudet University Press. Nicholas, S. A. (2018). Language contexts: Te Reo Māori o te Pae Tonga o te Kuki Airani. Language Documentation and Description, 15, 50–78. Nicholas, S. A., & Coto-Solano, R. (2019). Glottal variation, teacher training and language revitalization in the Cook Islands. In Proceedings of the 19th international congress of phonetic sciences (pp. 3602–3606). University of Melbourne, Australia. Odango, E. L. (2015a). Affeu fangani ‘join together’: A morphophonemic analysis of possessive suffix paradigms and a discourse-based ethnography of the elicitation session in Pakin Lukunosh Mortlockese [Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Manoa]. Odango, E. L. (2015b). Austronesian youth perspectives on language reclamation and maintenance. The Contemporary Pacific, 27(1), 73–108.
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Eleanor Ridge, Sally Akevai Nicholas and Richard Benton Okamura, T. (2021). Preserving the Nauruan language and Pidgin English in Nauru. In T. Okamaru & M. Kai (Eds.), Indigenous language acquisition, maintenance, and loss and current language policies (pp. 103–123). IGI Global. Pakendorf, B., Dobrushina, N., & Khanina, O. (2021). A typology of small-scale multilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(4), 835–859. Pawley, A., & Sayaba, T. (1971). Fijian dialect divisions: Eastern and Western Fijian. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 80(4), 405–436. Philips, S. U. (2007). Changing scholarly representations of the Tongan honorific lexicon. In M. Makihara & B. B. Schieffelin (Eds.), Consequences of contact: Language ideologies and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies (pp. 189–215). Oxford University Press. Posth, C., Nägele, K., Colleran, H., Valentin, F., Bedford, S., Kami, K. W., Shing, R., Buckley, H., Kinaston, R., Walworth, M., Clark, G. R., Reepmeyer, C., Flexner, J., Maric, T., Moser, J., Gresky, J., Kiko, L, Robson, K. J., Auckland, K., . . . & Powell, A. (2018). Language continuity despite population replacement in Remote Oceania. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2(4), 731–740. Puas, G. (2021). The federated states of Micronesia’s engagement with the outside world: Control, selfpreservation and continuity. ANU Press. Rangelov, T., Bratrud, T., & Barbour, J. (2019). Ahamb (Malekula, Vanuatu) – Language contexts. Language Documentation and Description, 16, 86–126. Reed, L., & Rumsey, A. (2020). Sign languages in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. In A. Kendon (Ed.), Sign language in Papua New Guinea: A primary sign language from the upper lagaip valley, Enga province (pp. 141–183). John Benjamins. Rentz, B. (2018). Pohnpei Sohte ehu: A survey-and discourse-based approach to language attitudes on Pohnpei [Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa]. Ridge, E. C. (2019). Variation in Vatlongos verbal morphosyntax: Speaker communities in Southeast Ambrym and Mele Maat [Doctoral dissertation, SOAS University of London]. Ridge, E. C. (2022). Patterns of variation in subject-indexing prefixes in Vatlongos, Southeast Ambrym. AsiaPacific Language Variation, 8(1), 72–105. Riley, K. C. (2007). To tangle or not to tangle: Shifting language ideologies and the socialization of Charabia in the Marquesas, French Polynesia. In M. Makihara & B. Schieffelin (Eds.), Consequences of contact: Language ideologies and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies (pp. 70–95). Oxford University Press. Ross, M., Pawley, A., & Osmond, M. (2008). The lexicon of proto oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society (Vol. 3: Plants). Pacific Linguistics, Australian National University. Saft, S. (2021). Language and social justice in context: Hawai’i as a case study. Springer Nature. Salaün, M. (2013). Decolonization without a disconnection? Teaching the vernaculars in New Caledonia today. Current Issues in Language Planning, 14(2), 217–230. Sallabank, J. (2015). Language ideologies, practices and policies in Kanaky/New Caledonia. In M. Jones (Ed.), Policy and planning for endangered languages (pp. 31–47). Cambridge University Press. Sanga, K., & Reynolds, M. (2019). Melanesian tok stori in leadership development: Ontological and relational implications for donor-funded programmes in the Western Pacific. International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives, 17(4), 11–26. Sanga, K., & Reynolds, M. (2021). Bringing research back home: Exploring Indigenous Melanesian tok stori as ontology. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 17(4), 532–542. Sankoff, G. (2021). A local history of Tok Pisin. In E. O. Aboh & C. B. Vigouroux (Eds.), Variation rolls the dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene (pp. 57–80). John Benjamins. Sano, F. (2022). A pilot study on the regional and ethnic variations in Fiji Sign language: Comparing Eastern and Western Viti Levu. Senri Ethnological Studies, 108, 41–56. Santos-Bamba, S. J. (2013). The languages of three generations of Chamorro women. Pacific Asia Inquiry, 4(1), 84–93. Schapper, A. (2020). Linguistic Melanesia. In E. Adamou & Y. Matras (Eds.), Routledge handbook of language contact (pp. 480–502). Routledge. Schmidt, H. (2003). Loanword strata in Rotuman. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science Series, 4, 201–240. Schneider, C. (2018). Ideologies, practices, and their effect on dialect vitality: A case study from Vanuatu. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 39(1), 60–75. Schneider, C., & Gooskens, C. (2017). Approaching micro-level planning from an intelligibility perspective: A case study from Pentecost Island, Vanuatu. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 38(6), 530–544.
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29 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN NEW GUINEA Mark Donohue
Introduction New Guinea is home to 0.2% of the world’s population, in 0.2% of the world’s land area, with 18% of the world’s languages, belonging to at least 50 families (Foley, 2000). The largest language in the area, Enga, has less than 200,000 speakers; the smallest known stable, non-endangered language situation is Masep, which has not been demonstrated to be related to any other languages, and has had a population of less than 40 speakers for over 60 years (Clouse et al., 2002). Politically the region is split into two, with the eastern half the territory of Papua New Guinea, independent since 1975, and the western half formerly being a Dutch territory, but Indonesian since annexation in 1961; each half has its own national language(s). In addition to the baseline complexity that such a linguistically diverse environment guarantees, the island has been subject to four different colonial administrations, each with their own official languages (Dutch and Malay, and later Indonesian in the west, German and later English in the east), and has generated three pidgins/creoles that have achieved widespread use in different areas (local Malay varieties in the west, Tok Pisin varieties in most of the east and Hiri Motu in the south half of the east), as well as the official languages.
Language and identity Language is very important to the establishment, and maintenance of, identity. Crowther (2001, p. 4), describing the One linguistic community, summarises a typical situation: “There is a high degree of linguistic awareness among One speakers, who have a clear (though not always identical) concept of the extent of One, and a recognition of where the borders lie and what lies beyond them (linguistically).” All speakers are aware of the linguistic differences between varieties and will cite them enthusiastically. For example, when taking a wordlist in Molmo village, one person who was married to a Siama woman supplied the Siama equivalents. Many of the Siama forms given were predictable – a substitution of Molmo [l] with [n], which represents a valid sound correspondence between the two varieties. Upon visiting Siama village, the wordlist was checked and numerous items were found to be completely different. For example, wala ‘liver’ in Molmo was claimed to be wana in Siama, but in reality the form in Siama is unrelated, kʊnjɔ. In other interactions speakers from one village have been observed insisting that the constructed (but not attested) pseudo-cognate is the correct form, while speaking to native speakers of a different variety that does DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-33 348
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not have that cognate, and that the speakers from that second village are not speaking their own dialect correctly. This is exemplified in the following extract from a conversation between speakers from two different villages, Molmo (M) (in a., c., e., g. and i.) and Inebu (I) (in b., d., f., h.). Both speakers are accommodating to each other’s speech variety; words that are from Molmo are shown in italics, words from Inebu are underlined. Words that are common to both are plain, and bold indicates a word from the (prestigious) Sapin variety in d., e. and h.; and bold italics in h. shows a Tok Pisin word. Molmo is closer to Sapin, but Inebu is more populous. We can see extensive diglossia, with each speaker incorporating substantial numbers of words not from their own dialect. In (1d) the Inebu speaker uses Sapin words; the Molmo speaker is unsure of one of the words used, and on clarification (in (1f)) he corrects the Inebu speaker about his assumption, in g. In h. the Inebu speaker asserts that the Molmo speaker is wrong about his intuitions about his home language, using a Tok Pisin word to emphasis the disagreement; Tok Pisin is perceived as the language of government (pawa) and authority, and the use of nogat here makes the assertion very strong. In i. the Molmo speaker acquiesces, in the interests of avoiding conflict, and building pan-One solidarity.1 (1) a.
Yɔnɛ sa 2SG TOP ‘Are you well?’
u? good
(M)
b. Oo. Yinɛ? OK 2SG ‘You. And you?’ c.
(I)
U man. good INTENS ‘Very well.’
(M)
d. I upu yinɛ waple pɔ sa 1SG hear 2SG village LOC TOP ‘I hear there are many wallabies in your village?’ e.
Opo? [opo] ‘(What’s) “upu”?’
f.
Napɔ mulu. big marsupial ‘The big marsupial.’
g. Mine m-ire 1PL 1PL-speak ‘We say ‘kupu.’
(I)
(M)
(I)
‘kopo.’ [kopo]
h. Nogat. Pɔne p-ire No. 2PL 2PL-speak ‘No. You say “upu.”’ i.
opo mandɛlɛ? wallaby many
(M)
‘opo.’ wallaby
(I)
(M)
Oo. OK ‘Alright.’
This awareness of differences, combined with an insistence of shared authority that includes nonnative varieties, allows speakers to have a very strong sense of membership to the larger One 349
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group. They believe they are speaking the same ‘language,’ despite the fact that many of the varieties are unintelligible to one another and a lingua franca (Tok Pisin) is required for communication. This demonstrates the use, common across New Guinea, of a prescriptive (and frequently variable) interpretation of the linguistic similarities and differences between villages to make political capital. Despite being touted as a ‘sociolinguistic laboratory’ (Wurm, 1977; Wurm & Wurm, 1979), nuanced sociolinguistic research focused on New Guinea has mostly appeared in the last 20 years (e.g., Language use in Melanesia, issue 214 of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language). Numerous sociolinguistic surveys of language use in local language areas, including observations on language use, code-switching and variation, have been carried out by members of SIL International (see Summer Institute of Linguistics, n.d.), but little in the way of overall assessment other than Mühlhäusler (1975) and Romaine (1992). Schieffelin (1990) describes language socialisation in a southern New Guinea community, making a major contribution to the understanding of the sociolinguistics of children’s interaction with language. Kulick (1992) provides an insightful analysis of the form and function of different speech genres in a community with a highly endangered language (see also Foley, 2003). A much-needed research topic is the investigation of language use and code-switching between Tok Pisin and (Papua New Guinean) English in Papua New Guinea, and similarly between local Malay varieties and more ‘standard’ Indonesian in towns and cities in the Indonesian provinces. Work establishing the parameters that define the variation in use and spread of local Malay varieties is ongoing (Kim et al., 2007; Fields, 2010), and appears to be similar to those reported in Grimes (1991). Blaxter Paliwala (2020) discusses the ‘decreolisation’ process affecting Tok Pisin in urban settings in Papua New Guinea (see also Wakizaka, 2008), and Brownie (2012) discusses the dynamics of identity performance as revealed in local dialect levelling, Tok Pisin, and English in a remote community. Kashima (2020) highlights the importance of tight-knit social networks in allowing the rapid spread of clusters of micro-level changes to potentially effect language change in a short time frame (see also Ross, 1997, 2001; Thurston, 1987), driven in part by ideologies of language as a marker of local identity, in often multilingual contexts, and enabled by the traditionally egalitarian nature of the societies (see also De Vries, 2012; Dye & Dye, 2012; Wurm & Laycock, 1961; Wurm et al., 1984). Interestingly, Kashima finds only a minimal role of gender in explaining the diffusion of linguistic change. While national languages are promoted in both countries, the social cohesion of these languages varies. In the west varieties of Malay, related to Indonesian, have been used for over 100 years along parts of the north coast, and these have developed into locally influenced creoles (Donohue, 2007; Kluge, 2017), which have little or no mutual intelligibility with standard Indonesian. In more isolated areas Indonesian has only arrived with the formal presence of the government, and so is spoken in a very standard manner, with little regional creolisation (though significant firstlanguage phonological interference), and there are reports of a variety of Indonesian or Malay being increasingly used in areas beyond government control. Similarly, different dialects of Tok Pisin are found across Papua New Guinea. There is a strong divide between urban and rural norms, with urban Tok Pisin showing considerably more English lexification; for instance, (2) shows a sentence spoken in an urban variety of Tok Pisin, and (3) renders that same sentence into a rural, more basilectal, variety. (2) would not be unusual in Port Moresby, while in smaller villages near Vanimo we would expect the sentence in (3). (2) Yu mas diskas-im dispela problem 2SG must discuss-TR REF problem ‘You should discuss these problems.’ 350
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(3) Yu i mas tok-tok 2SG PRED must speak-RED ‘You should discuss these problems.’
long PREP
dispela REF
wari. problem
In addition to these sociolects, different regions show different phonologies (e.g., voiced stops are prenasalised in some areas, and absent in others) and/or differences in details of the grammar (e.g., the instantiation of the inclusive/exclusive contrast in the first person plural is absent in the north-west), as well as different lexicons, and we also observe significant differences depending on domain (Tok Pisin is different in schools than in the market place) (Mühlhäusler et al., 2003; Wakizaka, 2008). In Papua New Guinea the use of Tok Pisin is growing nationally, at the expense of both smaller local languages and other lingue franche. Tok Pisin is still strongest in its homeland along the north coast, where numerous plantations were established in colonial times. The other main lingua franca, Hiri Motu maintains its position as an important language of interethnic communication in the south, and numerous languages promoted by different missions as the language of religious instruction maintain their functions in restricted areas (e.g., McElhanon, 1979). Pre-contact pidgins were found in numerous areas (e.g., Donohue, 1997; Foley, 2006), and some are still used as languages of wider communication. Post-contact church languages have played a significant role in the linguistic ecologies of those areas where they are spoken (Paris, 2012).
Multilingualism The populations of New Guinea are overwhelmingly multilingual, traditionally in several local languages (a home or community language, one or more additional local languages, and perhaps a local trade language, if there is one), though in recent years proficiency in national languages, or varieties of national languages, has grown dramatically, replacing the earlier multilingualism with a simple local + national bilingualism in many areas. In its most extreme, particularly in townships and cities, this tendency has led to the rise of a significant number of people, mostly younger, who do not speak the village-language of their parents, but only the national language of the area they are in, or a variety thereof. In many cases, as is true elsewhere in, for instance, Indonesia, parents are deliberately not transmitting their local languages to children in an expressed effort to give their children an advantage in school. Areas in which church-sponsored schooling, in the local language, is prevalent predictably show less of this tendency. Away from this discussion of loss of varieties, the traditional sociolinguistic environment sponsored not only great bilingualism, but also great variety within the one language, with distinct special speech styles being employed in particular socio-cultural circumstances (e.g., Franklin, 1972), or when talking or referring to particular kin relations. The distinction between ‘language’ and ‘dialect,’ and between ‘subgroup’ and ‘language’ is a blurry one at best in the linguistic minds of many New Guineans, with speakers in some cases claiming understanding of what are clearly separate languages on the basis of one or two prominent shibboleths, while in other cases noncomprehension will be reported on the basis of a different (and proscribed) intonation pattern. Crowther (2001) discusses the interaction of social factors that shape the construal of ethnolinguistic identity in the eastern Bewani mountains. This said, even today speakers of the Vanimo coast languages often, when they find it advantageous to their argumentation, refer to the different villages from Skou to Vanimo, and Leitre, as speaking the ‘same language.’ Crowther (2001) documents the use of linguistic terminology by New Guineans to refer not to an individual language, as a linguist would define it, but to a 351
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linguistic sub-group, and this appears to be the case for Skou and its relatives as well. When questioned on actual intelligibility, I have found that interviewees usually back-pedal on their claims of linguistic unity, saying that, while the same languages, it is true that ‘the words are different,’ ‘the sounds are different,’ or ‘the other villages mangle the language.’ In the absence of extensive experience of surveying language attitudes in New Guinea, the kinds of information that would be acquired by questioning speakers of languages that one is not familiar with would not be overly helpful in determining language extent.
Language planning and language development Language policy in Papua New Guinea is enthusiastically supportive of local diversity, but the government fundamentally lacks the skilled workers and the funds to incorporate any languages (other than the main lingue franche, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu, as well as English) into the curriculum at school. Local radio in most areas makes only minimal efforts to be linguistically diverse, and television has little, if anything, that is not English. In western New Guinea, as with other regions inside Indonesia, the official policy that is very supportive of local languages is combined with de facto indifference at best, and indifferent suppression at worst. Various church- or mission-initiated programs promote local languages, but officialdom obstructs many of the advantages of these initiatives. Literacy in national languages is developing in cities, but remains minimal in the more numerous rural areas. Literacy in local languages can only be described as being in its infancy. Schieffelin (1995, 2000), and Walker (1987) describe the uptake, and impact, of literacy on traditional societies in New Guinea.
Language in use Very little work has been done on pragmatics and stylistics in New Guinea. A notable exception is Rumsey’s work on the genre of chanted tales (Rumsey, 2001, and ongoing work), Goldman (1984) on Huli disputes, and Merlan and Rumsey’s (1991) work on the role that language, and the manipulation of language, plays in a number of conventionalised public, political exchanges in the eastern highlands of New Guinea. One pervading characteristic of language use in New Guinea is the use of head-tail linkages (as noted by Longacre, 1972). This is apparent in examples such as Tok Pisin in (4), and Papuan Malay in (5). In these examples the end of each clause is repeated as the beginning of the next. That this feature has permeated into the lingue franche of both Indonesian New Guinea and Papua New Guinea is an indication of the prevalence of the construction in numerous local languages. (4) em i raun-im ol dispela brata, 3SG PRED go.around-TR PL REF cousin nau ol i raun i kam i stap SEQ PL PRED go.around PRED come PRED stay antap long Wutung. up PREP Wutung Nau ol i stap long ples Wutung. SEQ PL PRED stay PREP village Wutung ‘he chased up all the cousins, and they all came to stay in Wutung. So they were all in Wutung . . .’ 352
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(5) Dong nae jalan pi sampe di pondok. 3PL ascend go go.away arrive LOC hut Sampe di pondok dong duduk isterihat. arrive LOC hut 3PL sit rest Selese isterihat dong ambe barang jalan . . . finish rest 3PL take thing go ‘They follow the road to the hut. Arriving at the hut, they sit down and rest. After resting, they take their things and go . . . .’
Language endangerment As will have been gathered from much of the preceding discussion, language endangerment is a serious issue in New Guinea. Not just of the indigenous traditional languages, but also of the local lingue franche, which are being replaced by more standard varieties (Wurm & Heyward, 2001). Traditional languages are being lost rapidly in the urban context, and also in their more traditional domains. Especially in villages that have increasing contact mediated via an official language, that language creeps into village-internal domains, including use at home. This is most prevalent in coastal villages, but is also true of more interior locations that have regular outside contact (see Dye & Dye, 2012 for an interesting case study of language shift in a changed and changing social context). A number of church groups, notably the Seventh Day Adventists, actively campaign against the use of local language; other churches which are not actively opposed to the use of local languages also provide a domain in which local languages are not thought to be appropriate, thus speeding their endangerment. This is the result of having church workers who do not attempt to learn local languages, or work with translators, either local or overseas. Mühlhäusler (2003) presents an overview of the issues involved. It should be noted, however, that a quick sociolinguistic survey that shows the failure of children to speak the local language does not necessarily indicate that language loss is imminent. For instance, although children attending school in the Skou villages in north-central New Guinea do not speak the language, it is apparent that they do understand it, as they are frequently addressed in it by their parents and other elders. Indonesian, while the main language of the school-attending cohort in the village, appears to be, perversely, an ‘insider language,’ actively used in opposition to the language of the village to establish the identity of the teenagers. The fact that Indonesian is also used by the older people who travel to the markets in Abepura and Jayapura seems not to be a problem in its being appropriated by another age group for another purpose. The health of Skou, even when not spoken, can be gauged by the fact that on leaving school these same teenagers are suddenly speakers of Skou, even if only a few months have passed since their final Junior High School exams. This reflects their status now not as wards of the state educational system, immune from prosecution for any violations of village conduct because of their requirement to fulfil governmental requirements, but as members of the village community. As such, in the absence of any significant employment for Papuan school graduates, they now adopt a more traditional lifestyle, including gardening, hunting, fishing and speaking the language of their ancestors. This pattern of sociolinguistic comeback in each generation is not unique to the Skou, but has been observed by this writer elsewhere along the North New Guinea coast, on Yapen island (in both Ansus and Saweru), and in Warembori (Donohue, 1999). Janet Bateman (pc) reports a similar sociolinguistic environment amongst the Iau of the western Lakes Plains, a more traditional society. Amongst the Iau young people below marriageable age (which corresponds roughly to the age that Skou teenagers graduate from Junior High School, roughly 14–15 years old) are not traditionally expected to fit into the highly prescriptive sets of rules and behavioural regulations that characterise 353
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society on the Van Daalen river. They are permitted a significant degree of freedom, including that of the language they use, which is denied more ‘grown’ adults. Youngsters in Korodesi commonly speak in Elopi, a trade language of the lower Tariku river, at least as commonly as they speak Iau, but on reaching societal maturity they make the transition to being mainly Iau speakers, and Iau is no more an endangered language than is English. On the other hand, different areas show the encroachment of the national language at an alarming rate. Kulick (1992), discussing the situation in Gapun, observes that, despite the remote location, the younger generation are no longer learning the indigenous language Taiap. Furthermore, Taiap and the intrusive Tok Pisin have established different domains of use, all within the bounds of traditional society, even for those people who can speak Taiap (Kulick, 1992). Figure 29.1 shows what is really a simplified schematic of the pressures and dynamics that might affect a vernacular language community in New Guinea. The community, shown with a circle, is towards the end of a language chain leading to a different, but related, language, but is also spoken next to another, unrelated, language. There is likely to be mutual influence, shown with white arrows, along the continuum leading to the related language, effected by marriage, exchange of goods and ceremony. This influence might be lexical, with the use of the ‘outside’ lexical items available as a choice for some, but adopted as a marker of individual identity by others. The influence might be more profound, involving phonetic or phonological additions or subtractions, or morphosyntactic ones. In the scenario schematised in the figure the unrelated language on the right is more influential, by virtue of population or prestige in some form or another, and so we only see influence in one direction. At the same time, the language community will be pressured by the national language(s), and whatever local variety of that language is widespread. The influence of these languages appears through education and broadcast media. In the event that there is a separate local lingua franca, that language will also influence our language community, through its use for communication with different communities in trade or other settings. If there is a separate language used in local churches or mosques then that, too, will be an influence on the language community. As a result of the social pressures that lead to the adoption of words or language structures from these various languages we can expect the possibility of language shift; in addition to the language community losing members to the neighbouring languages, we will also see members shifting to varieties of the national language, and possibly also to the lingua franca (shown with the black arrows).
International language
National language
Religious language
Local variety of national language
Local lingua franca
Two related languages
Figure 29.1 Directions of language pressure and change Source: © Mark Donohue 2022
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Summary What work has been carried out in New Guinea reveals that it really is a ‘sociolinguistic laboratory,’ one that is finally starting to be investigated in detail, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The special features of New Guinea that make it valuable for sociolinguistic research are a combination of the generally unstratified social background, allowing for geography and identity to play a more direct role in explanations of language variation than in most other locales, and there being almost any imaginable combination of social and geographic factors present in one area or another waiting to be used as a testing ground for theory, and as a source of empirical data that will change our perception of the issues involved.
Acknowledgement Thanks to Alan Rumsey, for discussion of many of the issues raised here.
Abbreviations 1, 2, 3 first, second, third person SG singular PL plural INTENS intensifier LOC locative PRED predicate marker PREP preposition REF referential SEQ sequential TOP topic TR transitiviser
Note 1 The correspondences for words that are not identical in both villages in the conversation in (1) are shown in the following table.
English
Molmo
Inebu
Sapin
Tok Pisin
1SG 1PL 2SG 2PL good village wallaby many speak no
i minɛ yinɛ pinɛ opɔ waple kopo mɔpu irɛ ɔne
i mɔnɛ yɔnɛ pɔnɛ u waplɛ ɔwri tulɛ irɛ ɔnɛ
aj mɛnɛ nɛ pɛnɛ ɔrɔ waplɛ woŋgɔya mandɛlɛ ɔblɔ ɔnɛ
mi mipela yu yupela gutpela ples sikau planti tok nogat
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Mark Donohue The contentious word for wallaby is not attested as opo in any known One varieties; the lexeme kɔpu~kupu ‘wallaby’ is attested in a number of villages to the south of Molmo (Wondu, Siama and Alkula, the last of which is close to Inebu). Generally, a /k/ in these varieties corresponds to a Ø in Molmo, so the Inebu speaker’s assumption is not unwarranted. The status of the non-form opo is widespread; in a different conversation I have heard a Molmo speaker insisting that the word for wallaby is opo in Inebu, where *k > Ø has also applied.
References Blaxter Paliwala, A. (2020). Language contact and Tok Pisin. The Oxford handbook of language contact. www. oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199945092.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199945092-e-35 Brownie, J. (2012). Multilingualism and identity on Mussau. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 214, 67–84. Clouse, D., Donohue, M., & Ma, F. (2002). Survey report of the north coast of Irian Jaya. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002–078. www.sil.org/silesr/abstract.asp?ref=2002-078 Crowther, M. (2001). All the One language(s) [Thesis, University of Sydney]. De Vries, L. (2012). Speaking of clans: Language in Awyu-Ndumut communities of Indonesian West Papua. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 214, 5–26. Donohue, M. (1997). Some trade languages of insular South-East Asia and Irian Jaya (including Map 78: Precolonial contact languages of Irian Jaya, and Further contact languages of Irian Jaya). In S. A. Wurm, P. Mühlhäusler, & D. T. Tryon (Eds.), Atlas of languages of intercultural communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas (pp. 713–716). Mouton de Gruyter. Donohue, M. (1999). Warembori grammar sketch [MS, University of Sydney]. Donohue, M. (2007). Variation in voice in Indonesian/Malay: Historical and synchronic perspectives. In Y. Matsumoto, D. Y. Oshima, O. R. Robinson, & P. Sells (Eds.), Diversity in language: Perspectives and implications (pp. 71–129). CSLI Publications. Dye, T. W., & Dye, S. F. (2012). A tale of three languages: Language shift in a micro-context. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 214, 27–38. Fields, P. (2010). Papuan colloquial Indonesian. SIL Electronic Working Papers 2010–005, September 2010. www.sil.org/resources/archives/7831 Foley, W. A. (2000). The languages of New Guinea. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29, 357–404. Foley, W. A. (2003). Register, genre and language documentation in literate and preliterate communities. In Peter Austin (Ed.), Papers in language documentation and description, volume 1 (pp. 84–97). School of Oriental and African Languages. Foley, W. A. (2006). Universal constraints and local conditions in Pidginization: Case studies from New Guinea. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 21, 1–44. Franklin, K. J. (1972). A ritual pandanus language of New Guinea. Oceania, 43, 66–76. Goldman, L. (1984). Talk never dies: The language of Huli disputes. Tavistock/Methuen. Grimes, B. D. (1991). The development and use of Ambonese Malay. In Hein Steinhauer (Ed.), Papers in Austronesian linguistics 1 (pp. 83–123). Pacific Linguistics A-81. Kashima, E. (2020). Language in my mouth: Linguistic variation in the Nmbo speech community of Southern New Guinea [PhD thesis, The Australian National University]. https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu. au/handle/1885/201927 Kim, H., Shon, S., Rumaropen, B., Scott, G., & Scott, E. (2007). A description of some linguistic and sociolinguistic features of Papuan Malay. Paper presented at the Workshop on the Languages of Papua, Manokwari, 8–10 August 2007, Manokwari, Indonesia. Kluge, A. (2017). A grammar of papuan Malay (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 11). Language Science Press. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.376415 Kulick, D. (1992). Language shift and cultural reproduction: Socialization, self and syncretism in a Papua New Guinea village. Cambridge University Press. Longacre, R. E. (1972). Hierarchy and universality of discourse constituents in New Guinea languages: Discussion. Georgetown University Press. McElhanon, K. A. (1979). Some mission lingue franche and their sociolinguistic role. In S. A. Wurm (Ed.), New Guinea and neighbouring areas: A sociolinguistic laboratory (pp. 277–289). Pacific Linguistics. Merlan, F., & Rumsey, A. (1991/2006). Ku Waru: Language and segmentary politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley. Cambridge University Press.
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Sociolinguistics in New Guinea Mühlhäusler, P. (1975). Sociolects in New Guinea Pidgin. In K. A. McElhanon (Ed.), Tok Pisin I Go We?: Proceedings of a conference Held at the University of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby, P.N.G., 18–21 September 1973 (pp. 59–75). Kivung special publication, 1. Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea. Mühlhäusler, P. (2003). Language endangerment and language revival. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(2), 232–245. Mühlhäusler, P., Dutton, T. E., & Romaine, S. (2003). Tok Pisin: Texts from the beginning to the present. John Benjamins. Paris, H. (2012). Sociolinguistic effects of church languages in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 214, 39–66. Romaine, S. (1992). Language, education and development: Rural and Urban Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. Oxford University Press. Ross, M. (1997). Social networks and kinds of speech community event. In R. M. Blench & M. Spriggs (Eds.), Archaeology and language (Vol. 1: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations, pp. 209–261). Routledge. Ross, M. (2001). Contact induced change in Oceanic Languages in North-West Melanesia. In A. Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (Eds.), Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance (pp. 133–166). Oxford University Press. Rumsey, A. (2001). Tom Yaya Kange: A metrical narrative genre from the New Guinea Highlands. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11, 193–239. Schieffelin, B. B. (1990). The give and take of everyday life: Language socialization of Kaluli Children. Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, B. B. (1995). Creating evidence: Making sense of written words in Bosavi. Pragmatics, 5(2), 225–244. Schieffelin, B. B. (2000). Introducing Kaluli literacy: A chronology of influences. In P. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language (pp. 293–327). School of American Research Press. Summer Institute of Linguistics. (n.d.). Papua New Guinea. www.silpng.org Thurston, W. R. (1987). Processes of change in the languages of North-Western New Britain. Pacific Linguistics B-99. Wakizaka, M. (2008). On the issues of language contact and language shift in Tok Pisin – Focusing on two “non-standard” varieties: Highlands Pidgin and Anglicised Pidgin [MA thesis, The University of Adelaide]. Walker, R. (1987). Dani literacy: Explorations in the sociolinguistics of literacy. Irian, 15, 19–34. www. papuaweb.org/dlib/irian/index.html Wurm, S. A. (1977). New Guinea area languages and language study vol.3: Language, culture, society, and the modern world. Fascicle 1. Pacific Linguistics C-40. Wurm, S. A., & Heyward, I. (2001). Atlas of the world’s languages in danger of disappearing, second edition, revised and enlarged. UNESCO Publishing. Wurm, S. A., & Laycock, D. C. (1961). The question of language and dialect in New Guinea. Oceania, 32(2), 128–143. Wurm, S. A., Laycock, D. C., & Mühlhäusler, P. (1984). Notes on attitudes to pronunciation in the New Guinea area. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 50, 123–146. Wurm, S. A., (Ed.). (1979). New Guinea and neighboring areas: A sociolinguistic laboratory. Mouton.
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PART IV
Africa
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-34
30 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN NORTH AFRICA Catherine Miller and Dominique Caubet
Introduction North African countries [NA] in this chapter include Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Sudan (former Northern Sudan up to 2011). A demographic estimate of the population for these countries is about 255 million inhabitants in 2021.1 Dominance of Arabic and multilingualism are the two common features of this large area which, nevertheless, covers different national sociolinguistic contexts. Arabic is the official language for nearly all these countries (except for Sudan since 2019). It is also the dominant vernacular and vehicular language, and encompasses many diverse colloquial varieties. The former colonial languages (French, English and, in a lesser degree, Spanish and Italian) continue to play an important role particularly in the economic, media and educational domains but have no official status (except for English in Sudan in the 2005 constitution). With an estimate of seventy vernacular languages, the Republic of Sudan has by far the highest degree of language diversity compared to the other countries. Amazigh/ Tamazight2 (i.e. Berber) is the second important vernacular in Morocco and Algeria with an estimate of respectively 35% and 25% of Amazigh speakers. Amazigh is also present among minority groups in Libya (10%), Tunisia (1%), Egypt (estimate 20,000 people in the Siwa Oasis) and Mauritania (no statistics available). Other vernacular languages include Nubian in Egypt and Sudan (estimated 900,000 speakers), Wolof, Soninké and Pulaar, representing 30% of the population, in Mauritania. As for the constitutional status of languages, there have been recent evolutions in most countries, especially after the political uprisings of 2011. The non-Arabic vernaculars that used to be marginalised during the second part of the 20th century due to post-colonial and Pan-Arab nationalistic ideologies have been granted either national status (in Sudan in 2005, in Mauritania in 1991 and 2012) or official status as in the case of Tamazight/Amazigh in Algeria in 2016, and in Morocco in 2011. Change in the social values and functions of NA Arabic vernaculars is another component of NA societies. In the last two decades, NA experienced important social, economic and political changes that gave rise to new sociolinguistic dynamics. The implementation of a neo-liberal economy, the opening of the traditional media sphere (radio, TV), the rapid development of the digital sphere (mobile phones and internet), the growing visibility of the “civil society”, the activism of the cultural and artistic scenes and last but not least, the numerous political uprisings culminating 361
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in 2011 (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, but also Morocco) and 2019 (for Algeria and Sudan), have contributed to shape and reshape language uses and language norms within the public space. Therefore, scholarship in linguistic anthropology and cultural studies has taken a more central role in the field. There has been a clear tendency towards the blurring – and transgressing – of traditional disciplinary boundaries in order to study youth urban culture, new media and cultural scenes, digital literacies, the transition to writing in non-official languages among their users, and political and artistic expression of revolutionary movements. From 2008 to 2021, sociolinguistic studies in NA have grown tremendously in terms of publications and domains of research. However, this development is unevenly distributed within the NA countries, particularly regarding theoretical and methodological approaches as well as languages of publication. SL studies on Arabic and on Amazigh often belong to different circles with relatively few contacts between them up to recent times. Sociolinguistic studies on Amazigh focus mainly on issues related to language and corpus planning in view of their official recognition. Sociolinguistic studies on Arabic in NA tend to be integrated in publications covering the wider MENA region. Numerous recent handbooks, including both North Africa and the Middle East, aim to present updated state-of-the-art accounts of Arabic sociolinguistics (Bassiouney, 2009; Albirini, 2015; Al-Wer & Horesh, 2019; Bassiouney & Walters, 2020). But they often lack a comprehensive bibliography of references written in Arabic, French, Italian and Spanish. Among the main SL references covering the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) are the books of Sayahi (2014) and Chachou (2018) as well as the thematic issues of journals edited by de Ruiter and Ziamari (2018) and Hachimi et al. (2022). Sayahi (2011) focuses on Tunisa whereas Benítez Fernández et al. (2013) present a panorama of on-going sociolinguistic changes in Morocco. Among the important thematic and methodological changes in Arabic sociolinguistics, one notes the decline of studies based on traditional recordings on site and the shift to delocalised enquiries based on online media and cultural productions (oral and written). The latter are perceived as avenues for the analysis of metalinguistic discourses, representations and ideology.
Multilingualism, linguistic policies and linguistic activism Multilingualism, pluriglossia and language ideology Linguistic policies and ideological stands towards multilingualism are still important topics in NA (Abdelhay et al., 2011; Benítez Fernández, 2010; Bullock, 2014; Daoudi, 2018; Moulaye Ahmed, 2020; Sayahi, 2014). Linguistic plurality – that was always present in the society – has been recently officially recognised or at least tolerated in most NA countries. It has thus become a legitimate topic within national academic institutions as well as in civil society. It is remarkable, for instance, to see how Algerian researchers picture multilingualism as an historical and deeply rooted daily reality that shapes oral as well as written practices (Morsly & Cherrad, 2017).3 Studies of the linguistic landscape of urban environments reveals this diversity (Moustaoui, 2019). Ideological or identity factors are no longer considered exclusive factors of language choices. Translingual language practices in the media and the economic sectors (advertising), highlights the “commodification” of language (Chachou, 2013; Miliani & Roubaï-Chorfi, 2011). However linguistic conflicts are still present in most NA countries, particularly regarding the educational system where competition between Arabic and French or English continues to fuel public debates (Boutieri, 2016). These linguistic conflicts encompass different configurations: Standard Arabic versus “foreign languages”, i.e. former colonial languages; Standard Arabic versus vernacular Arabic; Arabic versus non-Arabic vernacular languages, and a newcomer in the Maghreb, English. 362
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Status of minority languages/language planning/language and ethnicity The official status and social role of the “minority” languages as well as grassroots linguistic activism are analysed following two main trends: (a) a positivist one focusing on minority rights and the need for empowerment of endangered languages; (b) a deconstructionist trend inspired by post-colonial and black linguistic studies criticising the strengthening of ethno-linguistic boundaries. The latter is particularly prominent among recent studies on Sudan. In Mauritania, Wolof, Soninké and Pulaar are considered “national heritage common to all Mauritanians” since the revised version of the Constitution in 2012. However Arabic – both Standard Arabic and Hassaniya vernacular – dominates in all sectors of the society (Taine-Cheikh, 2014). This domination that reflects strong ethnic and racial inequality fuels ethno-linguistic activism, particularly among the Pulaar community (Hames, 2017; Hemmig, 2020; Ould Zein, 2010). In Sudan, the Naivasha Peace Agreement of 2005 between North and South Sudan and the transitional constitution of 2005 constituted an important step towards the recognition of linguistic plurality. All “indigenous languages” were recognised national languages whereas Arabic and English are the official working languages. Following this post-2005 context, several international projects were launched on endangered languages such as the languages of the Nuba mountains. After the partition of the country in 2011 and the uprising of 2019, a Constitutional Charter for the Transitional Period was adopted not mentioning any official or national language but stating the guarantee of non-discrimination for a number of rights, “such as race, colour, gender, language, religion, political opinion, social status, or other reason” (art. 43). The ideological stances of the Sudanese colonial and post-colonial linguistic policies as well as the on-going ethno-linguistic activism have been critically analysed and deconstructed by a number of scholars including the numerous contributions of Ashraf Abdelhay and Sinfree Makoni (Abdelhay et al., 2015, 2016). Colonial categories continue to shape language representations that tend to essentialise language and ethnic boundaries (Miller, 2018). Literacy projects and grassroots activism for the autonomy and writing of each ethnic language contributes to this trend (Manfredi, 2015). In the meantime, surveys studying language uses and attitudes within non-Arab communities, such as Garri and Mugaddam (2015) for Darfur point that in spite of the on-going spread of Arabic, identity factors and ethnic revival foster society mobilisation for the defense of endangered languages. In the Maghreb, Tamazight was recognised as a national language in Algeria in the 2002 constitution and then as the second official language in the 2016 constitution. In Morocco, the existence of Amazigh was enacted in two royal speeches (Hassan II in 1994 and Mohammed VI in 2001), but only became an official language in the 2011 constitution. In both countries, corpus planning and teaching started before the officialisation, due to intense Amazigh activism (especially in Algeria where Tamazight was introduced at school in 1995). This activism was later co-opted by state institutions like HCA (Haut Commissariat à l’Amazighité) in Algeria and IRCAM (Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe) in Morocco. Amazigh was introduced in the schooling system in 2003 and Tifinagh script was chosen for the writing. Dictionaries, grammars and school books were produced by these state institutions. In the two countries there are close links between militants and academics and most of the publications discuss issues related to corpus planning (choices of script, types of codification, level of standardisation, etc.) as well as the impact of officialisation on language uses and representations (Bektache, 2018; Boukous, 2013; El Aissati, 2014; Sini, 2015).4 Radio and TV programmes as well as cinema and literature participate in the artistic revitalisation of Amazigh (Belhiah et al., 2020). Internet acts as an important forum of Amazigh expression (Merolla, 2019). Important changes have also taken place in Tunisia and Libya following the 2011 uprisings. In both countries, Amazigh communities who used to be completely silenced are actively participating in the 363
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recognition and the revitalisation of their language (Gabsi, 2022; Ferkal, 2017). For the time being, this activism has not led to any constitutional changes but Amazigh issues are embedded in a larger social debate on minority rights (Pouessel, 2018). In Egypt, the sole remote Egyptian Amazigh enclave is the oasis of Siwa which attracted recent research on the Siwi language and its contact with Egyptian Arabic. An original sociolinguistic contribution is that of Valentina Serreli (2019), who investigated the identity function and the symbolic values of language through an ethnographic observation of language uses and folk metalinguistic discourses in the Oasis of Siwa. Siwi speakers are becoming more and more bilingual Arabic-Siwi but remain positive and confident in the future of their language, even though they don’t militate for its official recognition by the Egyptian state, which only has one official language, “Arabic”.
Arabic vernaculars, and the perception of social and stylistic variation Dialectology studies Due to the very rich dialectal diversity, NA Arabic dialectology studies continue to be a productive field. Numerous papers can be found, for instance, in the bi-annual Proceedings of the Association Internationale de Dialectologie Arabe (AIDA), with a development of syntactic and pragmatics studies5 as well as specialised journals such as Zeitschrift Für Arabische Linguistik. The University of Zaragoza, in its Estudios de Dialectología Árabe series, has published many detailed descriptions of NA dialects based on long-term field researches,6 including areas which were relatively little described such as Northern Morocco (Vicente et al., 2017) or Tunisia and Libya (Ritt-Benmimoun, 2017). Among other studies, Bouhania (2012) covers Southern Algeria. Advance in the knowledge of the dialectal diversity of these regions led a young generation of linguists (Bettega & Morano, 2022) to legitimately challenge the traditional classification of dialects established a hundred years ago by the big names of colonial French Maghrebian dialectology. The authors investigate new typological criteria (such as syntactic ones, that were neglected in previous classifications) and suggest new means of classification. The role of substratum languages in contact-induced change in Arabic is also revisited particularly within Lucas and Manfredi (2020), who follow Van Coetsem’s theory concerning the different transfers according to types of transmission and the distinction between borrowing and imposition.
Dialect contact, convergence and accommodation Dialect contact and the development of supra-local varieties, based on urban vernaculars and functioning as informal standards, remain complex issues due to the maintenance of strong local regionalism in countries like Morocco, Algeria and Libya. Numerous studies indicate that speakers of more rural or regional varieties tend to have derogatory attitudes toward their ways of speech; they point to processes of vernacular standardisation (Ech-Charfi, 2016 for Morocco). Urban vernaculars are associated with modern ways of life (Chakrani, 2013). However, evidences of complete dialect shifts are rare. Sanchez and Vicente (2012), point out the maintenance of strong regional particularisms in both Northern and Southern Morocco, that resist long-term accommodation towards a national koine. It is rather the local urban dialects (Tetouan, Tangier) that act as poles of convergence for the Northern rural dialects (Vicente & Naciri, 2018). 364
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Social value of variation/indexicalisation/folk representations and ideology Following third wave sociolinguistic approach, recent studies on Morocco adopt Eckert’s perspective that views linguistic variation not as a mere reflection of social categories, but as constituting a social semiotic system. Hachimi (2012) for instance analyses how three features of the speech of Fes have been reinterpreted and reallocated new social and stylistic meanings in Casablanca, and what local categories (posh, effeminate) they have come to index. In the same line, Falchetta (2019) investigates the contextual social values of a selection of features including the affricate variable of /t/ among youth in Morocco. Recent studies investigate intra-national as well as inter-national vernacular hierarchies through language practices and ideological stances. Folk perceptions of vernacular hierarchies are dominantly investigated through media and online performances (Achour-Kallel, 2011 for Tunisia, Bassiouney, 2018 for Egypt, D’Anna, 2018 for Libya, Miller, 2012 for Morocco). In this regard, a number of papers in Hachimi et al. (2022) have the merit of developing broader methodology. They explore dialect variation, stereotypes and metalinguistic discourses by crossing “natural data” of daily speech with “performance data” recorded from the media and social networks (series, sitcoms, memes, talk-shows, etc.). Entertainment programs of Pan-Arab satellite TVs like Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, etc. offer vivid examples of the Maghreb-Mashrek vernacular hierarchies, largely commented and discussed by Internet users on chats and forums (Hachimi, 2017; Bassiouney, 2015; Schulthies, 2015).
Language and gender Gender Studies, Women’s studies and recently Men’s Studies, have developed inside the sociolinguistic framework, analysing the new gender approach of languages (Bouhout, 2020; Moïse et al., 2020). Vicente (2009) edited a complete issue of the journal EDNA on different aspects of women speech in Arabic dialects. An original perspective is presented by Ziamari and Barontini (2019) analysing how young urban Moroccan women challenge gender barriers and tend to speak like “guys”. Pereira (2010, 2020) has done pioneer work on the masculine side and the construction of masculinity among young men in Libya.
Recent trends: new literacies, youth culture and revolutionary landscape The growing visibility and the vitality of youth culture – covering youth language practices, the aesthetic of politics, music, artistic expressions, digital communication and so forth – have quickly gained the attention of sociolinguists. Those changes were already present before 2011 but the revolutionary spirit of the “Arab Spring” (reactivated in 2019 for Algeria and Sudan) put them under the spotlight. The digital activists became “the voice of a generation that does not recognize itself in the language of mainstream media and discourse” (Pepe, 2019, p. 116). Youth are at the crossroads of the digital revolution, and the feeling of alienation from the nation.
Digital writings and new literacies The traditional and profoundly internalised standard/vernacular hierarchy has been weakened from different angles, as it appeared from the political and societal debates about the role of vernacular Arabic (Caubet & Miller, 2016). Nowhere is it more visible than in writing practices, even if the use of non-standard writings has a rather long history (Meouak et al., 2012). The arrival of Internet and mobile phones led to profound changes, first in practices and more and more in ideology. 365
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These new tools open the door for the development of informal writing and the increasing use of vernacular or mixed Arabic, particularly on the digital networks such as Facebook and Twitter (Caubet, 2017; Nordenson, 2017) but also on online newspapers (Pennisi, 2020). Høigilt and Mejdell (2017) provide a vivid overview of these changes with papers covering different aspects of writing practices in Egypt and Morocco. The survey undertaken by Kindt and Kebede (2017) indicates that in both countries vernacular writings have become accepted – and sometimes predominant – practices, in communication mediated by smartphones and on social medias. The first major change, already well depicted in the 2000s, was the use of an adapted Latin script in mobile and digital communications, a “trendy practice” that spread to advertising and some printed media (Aboelezz, 2012). In 2004, the implementation of tools for writing in Arabic script opened the door for the developments of literary blogs in Egypt, characterised by new literary styles (Pepe, 2019). The use of vernacular Arabic or codeswitching with French or English and youth expressions is considered to be a subversive literary style. It marks a change in aesthetic values (AchourKallel, 2016; Caubet, 2018a; Håland, 2017). It is spreading to printed material such as novels and newspapers (Høigilt, 2017). As mentioned by Caubet (2018b), this explosion of vernacular writings led to the conventionalisation and to a kind of informal standardisation.
Youth culture and revolutionary landscape Studies on NA youth language practices include several aspects: linguistic characteristics of secret slang items among street children in Sudan (Manfredi, 2008); uses of metaphors, curses and taboo words in youth interactions; translingual practices among migrant youths in diaspora (Miller, 2022). Music scenes and subcultures such as rap, metal, punk, raï, gnawa or electro shaabi produce a rich corpus of new texts mixing youth language and poetry (Boumedini & Dadoua Hadria, 2013; Caubet & Hamma, 2017). Their role as voices of political resistance have been questioned (Moreno, 2017; Gabsi, 2020), but they actively participated in the valorisation and diffusion of new language practices popularised by media and social networks. The sociolinguistic aspects of revolutionary times have been explored from three main sides: how they disrupted standard language ideology and hierarchy (Aboelezz, 2014; Sini & Laroussi, 2016); how language practices were perceived as symbols of patriotic engagement (Guellouz, 2016; Moustaoui, 2016; Sayahi, 2020); how revolutionary words flourished in the public space, with several studies focusing on graffiti, slogans and revolutionary songs (Abdulaziz, 2015 for Libya, Ali Bencherif, 2019; Ouaras, 2019 for Algeria, Ben Rejeb, 2014 and La Rosa, 2020 for Tunisia, Nicoarea, 2014 for Egypt, Casciarri & Manfredi, 2020 for Sudan, etc.). In sum, North African countries are defined in a novel manner in this chapter since they not only include Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, but also – in a more geographical conception – Egypt and Sudan (former North Sudan up to 2011). There have been important evolutions in most countries, especially since the political uprisings of 2011. The number of publications has increased tremendously and new fields of research have emerged like youth cultural practices, digital writings and new literacies.
Notes 1 The figure is obtained by adding up the latest figures for each of the seven countries on https://datareportal. com/reports/tag/Northern+Africa and in the tables published by www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm 2 Algeria chose the feminine name in Berber, Tamazight, and Morocco, the masculine form, Amazigh. 3 See also for example the journal Multilinguales published since 2013 by the University of Bejaia in Algeria: https://journals.openedition.org/multilinguales/4670
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Sociolinguistics in North Africa 4 Linguistic and sociolinguistic publications on Amazigh can be found in a number of specialised journals such as French Encyclopédie Berbère & Cahier d’Etudes Berbères (Inalco, Paris), Moroccan Azinagh (Ircam, Rabat), etc. 5 The Proceedings of AIDA can be found online: https://independent.academia.edu/AIDAAssociation InternationaledeDialectologieArabe 6 See https://puz.unizar.es/275-estudios-de-dialectologia-arabe
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31 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES OF WEST AND CENTRAL AFRICA Bruce Connell and David Zeitlyn
Introduction West and Central Africa in geographical perspective The regions of West and Central Africa (WCA) may be divided on geographical grounds, with savannah to the West and Central Africa having most of the remaining rainforest. Within these two regions however, one also finds considerable geographical and climatic variation. In West Africa – i.e. Mauritania in the west to Cameroon in the east – this variation runs from north to south as one moves from the Sahara Desert through the Sahel savannahs to forests and coastal plains and swamps. Central Africa is similar, although the region is dominated by rainforest. With respect to nation states, West Africa comprises Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Niger and Nigeria. Central Africa includes Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Angola, as well as Rwanda and Burundi (though these also have many close connections to East Africa). Cameroon forms a bridge or transition between these two regions, and is sometimes considered part of West and sometimes part of Central Africa. The countries we consider are shown on the map at the beginning of the Africa section of this Handbook.
Linguistic diversity and general characterization of the language situation in WCA Languages from three of the four traditionally recognized language phyla in Africa – Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo – are found in the WCA region. Eberhard et al. (2022) list over 1,700 languages for WCA, a figure that comprises close to 25% of all the world’s languages, and some 85% of Africa’s languages. Nigeria and Cameroon, the countries that form the meeting ground of West and Central Africa, are home to nearly half (789) of these languages, and their borderland is one of the most linguistically heterogeneous regions in the world. Most parts of WCA are multilingual and constitute rather heterogeneous linguistic settings. A language density map, such as that found in Gordon (2005; available at https://web.archive.org/web/20070208064728/ www.ethnologue.org/show_map.asp?name=Africa&seq=10) reveals the complexity of the linguistic setting of WCA. Even in those countries in WCA which have relatively few languages, 371
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-36
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e.g. Mauritania and Niger, where it will be recalled much of their area is desert, multilingualism is the norm. Most of WCA is served by one or more lingua francas (or vehicular languages) and/ or by regional languages; individual bi- or multilingualism is high, typically involving at least a home language and a regional lingua franca; it is not uncommon for people to have a repertoire of four or more languages, including the home or village language, one or more other local (or regional) languages, the regional lingua franca, as well as knowledge of a European language – that of the former colonial rulers. There are few areas where monolingualism (i.e. with respect to African languages) predominates; the Yoruba of western Nigeria may be an example, where their sizeable population and political dominance has obliged others to learn their language, rather than the reverse. Another example, at the eastern extent of our area is Burundi (though Kirundi slang is discussed later as a form of multilingualism). However, even among such populations, one finds some bilingualism as many have learned a former colonial language, or pidginized forms of it.
From early sociolinguistic research in WCA to a developing literature The sociolinguistics of WCA remains comparatively understudied. Indeed, the great majority of the languages of this region are understudied from any perspective; for many languages the basic descriptive work that must form a foundation for sociolinguistics has yet to be done. One cannot begin a sociophonetic study without first knowing the basic phonetic and phonological characteristics of a language; one cannot examine the social correlates of grammatical or lexical variation until a sufficient amount of research has been carried out on the grammar and lexis themselves. This is not to suggest that WCA languages have been totally ignored by sociolinguists. Indeed, since the first edition of this book sociolinguistic research in Africa generally has become more established, as reflected in the contents of The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics (Wolff, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook of African Languages (Vossen & Dimmendaal, 2020). Chapters in these publications are often not focussed on a specific region (e.g. WCA) but rather tend to be topic-oriented and general. Despite the increase in interest, much remains to be done, especially at the individual language level and given the great number of languages in WCA. The paucity of sociophonetic or variationist research, for example, remains; Ikò ̣tún (2010) is a rare case of a sociolinguistic analysis of vowel length variation. Though continuing political instability heavily constrains research in much of the area it is clear that detailed sociolinguistic work is emerging on a variety of different languages and the field is no longer entirely dominated by macro-sociolinguistic studies though this work of necessity continues. One aspect that emerges from this work that is of wider significance is the shift to taking multilingualism as the default or normative situation (with histories going back long before European colonisation; see Heugh, 2019), with monolingualism seen as needing special explanation. Such approaches have been developed in the rapidly expanding urban centers, but they also have analytic bite in the rural arena. Just as the move to multi-ethnic cities may have been a driver for linguistic innovation, so too may be the move to digital communication. This move may prove to be able to cope with the variety of different languages spoken in WCA. Additionally, the Human Language Technologies (HLT) associated with digital communication offer the promise of greatly simplifying the process of data collection in relatively undocumented and understudied languages (Roux & Ndinga-Koumba-Binza, 2019). Relatedly Deumert et al. (2019) look at current trends of African language use online as seen on Twitter, WhatsApp, multilingual messaging and also on different internet platforms (see also Pérez-Sabater & Maguelouk-Moffo, 2020). They conclude with a discussion of vernacular writing in blogs and Wikipedia which is now available in a few African languages (as summarized on the page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/African_languages). 372
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In his extended continent wide-survey of African socio- and applied linguistics (2018) Ekkehard Wolff considers the complicated relationships of language to education, where compelling evidence of the benefits of the use of African languages in primary, secondary and tertiary education is ignored by policy makers.1 But as he points out far more neglected is any consideration of language issues in development where the topic is avoided not only by national governments but by international organizations such as the UN and the World Bank, who behave as if language issues are an insignificant detail. Wolff himself has written a monograph (2016) on the complex interrelationship between language and development in Africa.
Multilingualism As already mentioned, a consensus is emerging that multilingualism should be the analytic norm (as Paulin Djité has long argued; see e.g. 2009). Some add to this an emphasis on creative, sometimes playful dynamics of language use between many languages.2 Bearth and Diomandé Fan (2004) consider this as a form of ‘indigenous multilingualism’ rather than a result of colonialism. Pierpaolo Di Carlo and Jeff Good’s (2020) edited collection contains case material from Cameroon and Senegal that explores rural forms of such indigenous multilingualism and their relationships to cultural diversity. Such rural multilingualism is depicted in Sowa and Lüpke’s (2015) film ‘Kanraxël – The Confluence of Agnack’ made in the Casamance region of Senegal. And using material from elsewhere in our region Pérez-Sabater and Maguelouk-Moffo (2020) take the topic online examining how multilingualism on Facebook and other platforms is used to signal multiple, shifting identities to complex shifting audiences. The work of Di Carlo, Good and colleagues has focused on issues of multilingualism in rural WCA, in particular the linguistically highly heterogeneous Lower Fungom area of the NigeriaCameroon borderland. Di Carlo (2015, 2018) draws attention to the need to ‘globalize’ sociolinguistic research, to move away from the Western academic tradition that has dominated much of this work in WCA, especially in urban areas where the language ecology has been largely shaped by the presence of colonial languages having prominent social functions. Instead Di Carlo argues that an approach based on “a non-superficial ethnographic knowledge of the target communities . . . can shape the tools to be used to interpret the social motivations of language choice . . . so as to adhere more closely to the observed sociocultural realities” (Di Carlo, 2015, p. 2), and “can lead [one] to observe unexpected phenomena and uncover portions of language ideologies offering novel avenues for a better understanding of African multilingualism as a whole” (Di Carlo, 2018, p. 141). Lower Fungom is described as an area of approximately 240 square kilometers comprising 13 independent village-chiefdoms, and having a total population of about 10,000. Eight distinct languages are spoken and, until the encroachment of Cameroon Pidgin in the past few decades, there had been no lingua franca. Individual multilingualism has thus been the norm for intervillage communication. In describing multilingualism in Lower Fungom, Di Carlo proposes a model based on an understanding of the nature of the village-chiefdom and the relative importance of individual village chiefs. His model relates spiritual security to the multilingual nature of Lower Fungom (in simple summary, ancestors must be addressed in their specific village language), providing insights that could not be achieved using a standard polyglossic model. Recognition of the need to understand the endogenous nature of multilingualism in rural WCA has led these researchers to a different approach to sociolinguistic documentation. Beginning with Childs et al. (2014) and followed up by Di Carlo et al. (2021), Di Carlo, Good and colleagues have proposed a methodology for language documentation in conditions where multilingualism is not only the norm, but must be considered foremost in documentary linguistic practice. This approach 373
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abandons the usual, tacit, assumption in language documentation that there is a single, easily identified entity to be documented. Sociolinguistic documentation must precede structural analyses, with attention to the lexico-grammatical code coming later. In effect this is taken up in D’Hondt’s (2019) discussion of the importance of analyzing natural language use, taking as data recordings of actual language performance, unstaged interactions rather than the results of questionnaire based surveys or native speaker intuitions. Both have their place in sociolinguistic research but should not be relied on alone. The analysis of such data may be inspired by conversational analysis (CA), which tends to the painstaking analysis of very detailed transcripts which can be laborious to produce. Although CA theorists are suspicious of native speaker intuitions, these have a role in the choice of which parts of a recording to transcribe: what strikes the analyst as interesting or anomalous.3 Harnischfeger et al. (2014) provide a powerful and important take on the dynamics of language evolution in environments of extreme multilingualism, drawing on cases from north-eastern Nigeria. They provide a linguistic version of Kopytoff’s (1987) African Frontier thesis, in which a political dynamic, a competition for followers, creates a constant irregular flux of similar polities from which some grow while others decline, eventually merging with more successful neighbours. This allows them to address head on the contradiction between the view referred to later that questions the existence of isolatable languages (e.g. the problems distinguishing dialects and languages) and people on the ground who respond with disbelief when told there’s no such thing as ‘a language’. As Harnischfeger et al. remind us, The key question we consequently need to ask ourselves is: what is a language, who names it, and who defines it? The task and challenge in this respect is to aim to produce contributions to the study of African languages that explore what actually constitutes a language, namely • • • •
the norms of linguistic praxis, a flexible variety of speech registers and codes, usage in communication, art, marking social hierarchies, etc., employment as a medium to create and express secrecy and taboo
. . . What we need to do in the meantime, however, is to come to a new and more useful definition of language as the sum of linguistic praxis; not as a mother tongue or ethnic code, but as part of ever-changing repertoires of interacting multilingual speakers. Harnischfeger et al. (2014, pp. 4–5) As they point out these arguments play out not only in linguistics, but perhaps more prominently in the existence of ethnic groups and ‘tribes’. Part of the solution they suggest is to change our analytic vocabulary and, following Good and Cysouw (2013), as well as Good and Hendryx-Parker (2006), talk instead of ‘languoids’, ‘doculects’ and ‘glossonyms’.4 With this formalism they try to resolve the long-standing problems of distinguishing dialects from languages in a principled fashion,5 which, among other things, upends the conceptual priority by starting with documentation and seeing how it relates to language names, ‘glossonyms’ (i.e. creating a doculect linking some data (documentation) with a glossonym), and then through a process of analysis to a languoid, which is a representation of a set of doculects. For example, a single recording of binary code switching would feature in two doculects. Though seemingly cumbersome it does provide a consistent formalism within which discussion can occur, e.g. whether two sets of data are best described as being of two dialects of one language or two related languages. 374
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Multilingualism and the urban–rural divide Clearly urban centers attracting people from many different places have their own dynamic in the development of pidgins, creoles and ‘youth languages’. The relative status of different lects connects with the relative status of different social groups and identities. One example of this is the changing role of Kiswahili in Bujumbura, Burundi, where it is becoming a key element of youth slang in part because of its previously low status (Hollington & Nassenstein, 2019, pp. 547–548, citing Belt, 2010). Mc Laughlin (2009) documents a similar complexity among urban Wolof speakers, while Boutin (2021) discusses these issues in Nouchi spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. The youth language Yanké, based on Lingala, is spoken in Kinshasa, the capital of The Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its central topos is that of the ‘tough street youth’ (Hollington & Nassenstein, 2019, p. 552) and variants are known in other cities in the region. Similarly youth in Cameroonian cities speak Camfranglais as well as French and Pidgin (Kießling, 2021). The speakers of a youth slang grow up and either change language forms or find that their children have developed their own version. This is a driver of language change. Such slangs need the critical masses of youths that are found in cities but as many authors have shown these are not the only forms of multilingualism which challenge the stereotyped contrast of multilingual = urban, monolingual = rural. As an example of this, Blench and Longtau (2016) discuss how rural youths, speakers of Tarok in Nigeria, consciously play with and stylize their language use (see also Faraclas, 2013). And not only are the networks connecting villages and towns-or-cities dense and multivariate, they are increasingly mediated by phones and digital communication so the distinction between town and village may not be as significant than that between having phone credit (“air time”) and not having such credit. Similar themes emerge in Susanne Mohr and Helene Steigerthal’s special issue (2020) of the journal Sociolinguistic Studies on African sociolinguistics between urbanity and rurality. The contributors explicitly attempt to break with an earlier concentration on urban phenomena and to examine the dynamic interplay between the two. In a related move, Harnischfeger et al. (2014) connect youth languages (often associated with urban centers) and secret languages (associated with ‘traditional’ rural activities). Thieves and dissident youth both want to be able to communicate without others being able to understand. Religious adepts, members of masquerade groups and so forth also want to control the flow of information so use forms of restricted code, resulting in what is quite similar although of course with the difference already noted that most young people eventually grow up so there is a built-in cyclical element to ‘youth languages’ which is absent from those associated with religious or initiatory groups.
Language endangerment and documentation Among the debates in understanding both the nature and degree of language endangerment in WCA, and in fact Africa generally, is whether or to what extent the threat to indigenous languages here resembles that seen elsewhere in the world. It has been asserted that Africa is different in that colonial languages play a lesser role, as the threat to local languages is seen to come primarily from national (African) languages and lingua francas (Brenzinger et al., 1991; Mous, 2003). Connell (2015) reports survey work from several centers in WCA which suggests rather, that the influence of colonial languages is growing (see also Schaefer & Egbokhare, 2010, mentioned later); at the same time, he argues that the role of colonial languages may be reconstrued more insightfully as the role of colonialism as it is its structures that have paved the way for the creation of national languages. Mazrui (2019) considers the role of colonial languages from a somewhat different angle – the sociolinguistic reflexes of the larger picture, including the need of politicians to be able to 375
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speak the former colonial languages since parliamentary debates as well as administration tends to be undertaken in them. He also notes the dominant role of colonial languages in many education systems. Pidgins, creoles and regional lingua francas complicate any simplistic distinctions between African languages and exogenous, formerly colonial languages as further discussed in Mesthrie (2012, 2019). The distribution of power crystalized in a variety of instructions including formal politics, administration, education as well as health services are critical settings (contexts) in which all language use occurs (also discussed in Wolff, 2016, 2018). Lüpke (2009, 2019) asserts the uniqueness of Africa from a different perspective. She raises questions about the universalizing criteria used by UNESCO (2003) to assess language vitality, suggesting that several of their nine criteria are inapplicable in the African context; for example, regarding the criterion of intergenerational transmission, she argues that it “is not the most prominent form of language socialization in many African contexts” (2019, p. 470). To the extent this is true of Africa, it may also apply in other parts of the world, but the more important point is that the criticism ignores the flexibility UNESCO advocates in applying the criteria.6 More importantly, Lüpke discusses the problems involved in labelling something ‘a language’ recognizing that as well as the dangers of reification there is a danger in academics not acknowledging the distinctions that people make on the ground (it is not only the researchers who reify and idealise on the basis of language ideologies). In parallel with Harnischfeger et al. (2014) she proposes an approach in which ‘language prototypes’ are emergent (p. 479). This has wider theoretical implications: as she points out, concepts such as “speech community” and “ethnolinguistic group” (p. 480) are not without problems and cannot simply be assumed to be safe, neutral analytic categories. Similar points are discussed in the context of case studies from Nigeria and Cameroon by Connell et al. (2021, p. 247) who recognize, along with Grinevald and Bert (2011) that, the notions of language community and speech community are problematic in situations of endangerment. The range of competence/fluency that exists among speakers of an endangered language makes problematic the identification of someone as a speaker (of language X), and hence who is member a language community; this makes defining the language community of an endangered language difficult, even if the boundary issues in establishing the limits of a speech community are more easily resolvable. We see these as legitimate concerns but ones that are resolvable in practice in the field and when dealing with research data. Alongside these debates advances have been made in documentation praxis, for example Di Carlo et al. (2021) insistence on prioritizing sociolinguistic documentation, as part of linguistic fieldwork. In much of WCA knowledge of the bare sociolinguistic linguistic settings of languages or groups of related languages, particularly as to their vitality, remains sketchy at best. Work undertaken to improve this situation in some areas includes basic survey work of the sort reported in Obikudo et al. (2015), Okolo-obi et al. (2020). Endangerment in Africa may commonly result from the replacement of minority vernaculars by indigenous majority languages. However, this is not the case among Edo North vernaculars. Schaefer and Egbokhare (2010, 2015), following their earlier report (Schaefer & Egbokhare, 1999), show that an intergenerational shift to a new home language (English) in the Edo region of southern Nigeria is now well underway, so a relatively sudden shift to moribund status for Edo North village vernaculars is close. Edo North is characterized by Schaefer & Egbokhare as a residual zone; they suggests languages of residual zones may be more prone to endangerment than those of spread zones, though Nichols (1992) claims language replacement to be a defining characteristic of the latter. 376
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Ouedraogo (2020) reports work done in the Wara region of Burkina Faso, where speakers of languages viewed as minority languages tend to have a good command of several languages but choose to transmit to their offspring only languages that provide them with more advantages on the economic and social levels. The result is weakening and jeopardizing the existence of these minority languages. Ouedraogo’s survey work done in Wara-speaking villages investigating language use in several functional domains shows this to be case among its younger speakers as they shift increasingly to the regional lingua franca Dioula and to French, the colonial language.
Other analytic frameworks: langage ecology and social networks Connell (2009, 2010), Connell et al. (2021), Lüpke (2019) and other recent work has explored how the idea of language ecology can provide a helpful framework for exploring changing patterns of language use in the sorts of complicated multilingual settings that are found throughout WCA. Connell et al. (2021) adopt the ecological model of Ludwig, Mühlhäusler and Pagel (2019) as an effective means of understanding language ecology and language contact. Less than 200 kilometers away from the Mambiloid languages studied by Connell et al., the work of Di Carlo and Good discussed earlier also exemplifies this sort of approach, in their case examining relatively stable patterns of radical multilingualism, sustained in part by traditional religious rituals: people in each location feel it is important to speak in rituals to their ancestors in ‘their own’ language (Di Carlo, 2018). Harnischfeger et al. add a further twist to this (2014, p. 23), that in order to preserve the power and the benefits that flow from ancestral rituals there is virtue in using languages that strangers cannot understand – possibly malign (ill-intentioned) strangers are excluded from contact with our ancestors since they don’t speak our language! Such work provides concrete instances of how smaller-scale multilingual societies can be what Lüpke calls “hosts of vitality” rather than of endangerment (2019, pp. 484–485). Senayon (2019) discusses similar practices of language shift/language maintenance as forms of ‘cultural policing’. Klaus Beyer has pioneered the application of social network analysis (SNA) in African sociolinguistics. This also has beneficial links to the analysis of language use online (e.g. smartphones etc) – patterns of text and WhatsApp messaging are relatively easy to map using network analysis. Beyer (2015) looked at the wider context of work on youth languages situating it within the paradigm shift from ‘multiculturalism’ to ‘superdiversity’. He explores how SNA, first introduced to sociolinguistic research by Lesley and James Milroy (Milroy & Milroy, 1985; Milroy & Llamas, 2013), in the urban Western setting of Belfast, can be used in WCA, in part because it can map shifting, flexible situations that themselves change of over time. This makes SNA particularly suitable for documenting youth and urban language situations, if data of sufficient quality can be collected. This last caveat can be significant: for a SNA analysis to be undertaken data must be robust and as near complete as possible (i.e. covering most of the network). More detail is given in Beyer and Schreiber (2017) including examples, such as which actors use which language to each other in a multilingual marketplace. They cite (p. 18) some early examples of research from WCA, in particular Jonathan Owens’ study of spoken Arabic variation in Maiduguri, Nigeria (Owens, 1998), which uses SNA to document closely knit social micro-groups. Other examples they cite are the use of SNA to analyze Portuguese-Based Creoles in West Africa (Graham, 2001) and Salami (1991) who uses SNA to combine the analysis of sociophonetic and social variation in Ile-Ife forms of Yoruba.
Conclusions We noted at the beginning of this chapter a continuing need for more sociolinguistic research in West and Central Africa; there has also been considerable development since the first edition of 377
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this book. We point especially to topics of wider significance, not just for sociolinguistics but of importance to linguistics generally. Two features we regard as being of particular importance are (1) normative multilingualism and (2) the languoid/doculect/glossonym documentary framework as a possible solution to the dilemma of distinguishing dialects from languages and related problems with counting languages. Assuming normative multilingualism raises the need to understand its different forms (e.g. endogenous rural as opposed to urban) as well as to explain rather than take for granted situations of monolingualism. It also complicates in interesting ways the sorts of material that linguistics has to analyze. This leads perforce to the documentary framework which has been developed in an environment of endogenous multilingualism. If work in WCA has led the way, we now must wait for the rest of the world (and the rest of linguistics) to catch up.
Notes 1 Although as Wolff notes this is beginning to change: “in 2010, ministers of education from eighteen African countries adopted the Policy Guide on the Integration of African Languages and Cultures into Education Systems” (Wolff, 2018, p. 928 citing Ouane & Glanz, 2010, pp. 50–57). 2 A range of concepts to help understand this have been suggested including translanguaging or polylanguaging (Deumert et al., 2019, p. 563) although we are yet to be convinced of their utility. Although MyersScotton assumed an underlying single matrix in her approach to code switching, earlier approaches did not. In urban contexts ‘metrolingualism’ has been suggested. This “describes the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language” Pennycook and Otsuji (2015, p. 3) quoted in Hollington and Nassenstein (2019, p. 547), 3 Although not cited by D’Hondt (2019) or Rüsch (2020), Zeitlyn’s early work (1994) is CA-inspired (his work on Mambila divination (Zeitlyn, 2020) was influenced by the related program of ethnomethodology from which CA originally emerged). In another case Zeitlyn (2005) uses a statistical approach to alternative deictic forms (person-referring expressions) to identify patterns (that relate to theories of politeness) in the transcript of a 45-minute recording made as a family prepared a meal at the end of a day. 4 See also Lüpke (2019) for discussion. 5 We note Gangue (2016) uses tools from dialectology and dialectometry to try and resolve these dilemmas in Togo. 6 “The Factor descriptions [i.e. the nine criteria] given above are offered as guidelines. Each user should adapt these guidelines to the local context and to the specific purpose of the project” (UNESCO, 2003, p. 17; emphasis in the original).
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32 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN EAST AFRICA Christina Higgins
Introduction For the purposes of this chapter, East Africa refers to Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. Multilingualism is the norm in these contexts. In larger nations such as Tanzania, there are over 120 endemic languages, and in small nations like Eritrea, approximately 15 languages are found. Most people make use of more than one language on a daily basis, including regional and global lingua francas. Languages from all of the major language families of the continent are found across East Africa, with many languages of the Niger Congo family primarily in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and the southern part of Somalia. Afro-Asiatic languages dominate the Horn of Africa, and languages of the Nilo-Saharan family are commonly spoken in South Sudan, as well as Kenya. Two Khoisan (click) languages are found in Tanzania. Like every country in Africa, these multilingual nations have experienced high degrees of language contact and language shift due to the movements of people from rural regions to urban centers in search of opportunities for education and employment. Moreover, these nations’ colonial histories have yielded complex language contact situations that have consequently produced powerful ideologies regarding the symbolic value of indigenous languages vis-à-vis former colonial languages. Though these East African nations do not share a single colonial history, all of them have inherited at least one language of a former colonizer. Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, and Uganda inherited English directly from the British. In the 1880s, the British occupied Kenya and Uganda and formed the Imperial British East Africa Company to develop trading opportunities for the imperial government in the region, eventually leading to the establishment of a formal colony in Kenya. Originally occupied by the Germans, Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika) was handed over to the British after World War I. After the war, the Allies divided German East Africa into League of Nations mandates. Great Britain was given most of the area and renamed it Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Zanzibar became a protectorate of the British in 1890 and eventually became part of Tanzania in 1964. Somalia has a more complex history, as it was sliced up at the Berlin Conference of 1884 into British Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, and French Somaliland. Somali is the official language next to Arabic and English, and Somali serves as the MOI in primary schools, while English is the medium for most secondary education. Several nations that comprise the Horn of Africa also share an English legacy. The four nationstates of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia were previously part of the same territory, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-37 382
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political maneuvers and imperialism led to different colonial powers influencing each region. Though never officially colonized by any nation, Ethiopia was occupied by Italy from 1936–1941 under Mussolini. The British helped to liberate Ethiopians from Italian occupation, thereby giving Emperor Haile Selassie power to impose Amharic, the language of the dominant political group, as Ethiopia’s official language. In the 1950s, English was also given a dominant position in schooling as the MOI in secondary schools due to the Amhara’s elite status and political ties with Western governments. Formerly colonized by the Italians, Eritrea was handed over to Ethiopia by the United Nations in 1952. In spite of tremendous resistance from Eritrea, the nation was officially annexed by Ethiopia ten years later, thus sparking a 30-year struggle for independence. Under Ethiopian rule, Eritrea’s co-official languages of Arabic and Tigrinya were replaced by the official language of Ethiopia, Amharic, and English became the language of schooling. After independence in 1993, no official languages were selected, though Tigrinya, Arabic, and English function as de facto working languages. Djibouti became the colony of French Somaliland in the nineteenth century and won its independence in 1977. French and Arabic are official languages, though the role of English in international trade continues to grow. South Sudan is a relatively new country, having formed in 2011 following a long struggle for independence from the north. In the late nineteenth century, the British ruled Sudan indirectly through Egypt, which in turn created divisions in Sudan to better control it. Northern Sudan was Arabic-dominant, while the south was multilingual and multiethnic. Arabic became widely spoken in the form of Juba Arabic, which has been termed a ‘pidgincreole’ (Manfredi & Tosco, 2018, p. 210). The north was targeted for development, leaving the south to Christian missionaries for educational needs, which in turn led to the introduction of English through schooling alongside local languages. Upon independence, English became the sole official language for education, and Swahili was added in 2017 as a second additional language to support the nation’s membership in the East Africa Community, an organization that promotes free trade in the region.
Themes in sociolinguistic research on East Africa As a region, East Africa has been unevenly researched from a sociolinguistic point of view. In the nations where sociolinguistics is nascent, existing research generally takes a macro-sociolinguistic lens, focuses on the sociology of language (Fishman, 1972), a field of study that investigates the effects that languages have on society and the role that languages play in social domains and social relations. The dominance of this perspective in research on Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, and South Sudan makes sense given the importance of offering descriptive foundations for language practices, analyzing the role of language education, creating national stability, and developing and sustaining economic partnerships both within and beyond East Africa. In contrast, sociolinguistic research has a much longer history in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and Ethiopia has been a site for productive work in recent years as well. This means that while research in all East African nations continues to engage with early foci such as language policy and planning for nationbuilding and educational contexts, a richer array of scholarship has accumulated in a number of very contemporary areas in part of the region. These include studies of the linguistic landscape, research on discourses of economic development, language and popular culture, and increasingly nuanced approaches to the study of youth language and linguistic variation. This difference in focus and quantity points to drastically disparate resources and uneven opportunity to conduct research across the nations that are a part of East Africa. In the pages that follow, I first focus on the macro-sociolinguistic areas of inquiry that have garnered the most attention from researchers, namely language policy and planning and language in education. 383
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I then turn to a wider range of scholarly work which embraces more micro-linguistic analysis of language use in relation to social topics, including multilingual interactions, the study of discourse-based investigations of language and identity, and the study of languages in the linguistic landscape.
Language planning Language planning in East Africa has been identified as a means of increasing democracy and economic opportunity, building regional unity within and between nations, and advocating for linguistic human rights. One of the most important developments in language planning work on East Africa in the past 10 years was the Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures, formed at a conference on African languages and literatures in Eritrea in 2000. These 10 principles include the recognition of African languages as the basis for decolonization, as sources of empowerment, as the medium of instruction in schooling, as instruments of African unity, and as resources for democracy. These principles are visible in South Sudan’s recognition of all of its languages as national languages, and in recent efforts to rejuvenate mother-tongue education policies in South Sudan (Spronk, 2014), Uganda (Ngaka, 2021), and Kenya (Mandillah, 2019). Two East African nations – Somalia and Tanzania – established language policies after independence with a decolonizing purpose, and as a means to build a national identity in relation to a single lingua franca. The Somalian government led one of the most effective campaigns among East African nations to reinstate an indigenous language after independence. The government supported the development of a writing system and then led national literacy campaigns. The Somali example has been examined in detail by Laitin (1977), in which he argues that the government’s support for Somali significantly affected the course of the country’s political development. More recently, Eno et al. (2016) consider how linguicism played a role in the selection of a single variety of Somali for nation-building. Tanzanian leaders selected Swahili as the unifying language after independence, viewing it as a language capable of engendering a spirit of umoja, or unity, among the many different ethnolinguistic groups. A negative consequence of this decision was that the ethnic languages became subordinated to Swahili and have never been developed for institutional purposes (Blommaert, 2014; Rosendal, 2017). A contrasting example comes from Eritrea, where the post-independence government explicitly sought to depoliticize ethnolinguistic diversity through language planning in support of multilingualism. While Tigrinya, English and Arabic are dominant languages in the nation, communities are able to choose education in all languages in the form of mother-tongue based education. To foster a sense of national integration, the Eritrean government made it required for all primarylevel children to take Tigrinya and/or Arabic, and English for higher levels of education. One outcome of this requirement is that many families prefer schools which teach in these dominant languages, rather than their own mother tongues, for the sake of efficiency and because materials are not widely available in other languages (Asfaha, 2015; Woldemikael, 2003). Beyond offering theoretical perspectives on language planning, researchers have engaged in and described language planning efforts to expand African languages’ domains of use. Much has been written about Kiswahili (Kishe, 2003), a language that has its own national planning council (BAKITA), Institute of Kiswahili Research (TUKI), and the Institute of Kiswahili and Foreign Languages (TAKILUKI) in Tanzania (cf. Mutembei, 2014). In comparison, the Kenyan and Ugandan contexts reveal many obstacles to Kiswahili language planning, most of which are due to vague language policy and the lack of a cohesive effort by the government (Onyango, 2018). Unlike Tanzania, no language council or Kiswahili institute exists in Kenya, and the development of technical terms in Kiswahili are due to volunteer efforts by scholars who do not always have 384
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the opportunity to work together to agree upon terms. Moreover, Kiswahili planning in Kenya suffers from a lack of dissemination routes and the lack of any mechanism for the assessment of any language planning that is carried out. Jjingo and Visser (2017) review the history of Uganda’s increased attention to the use of Kiswahili as well, offering an analysis of political and institutional changes that have led to the renewed interest in the language alongside efforts to establish mother-tongue based education (Namyalo & Nakayiza, 2015). Swahili became the national language of Uganda under colonial rule in an attempt to establish a unified medium of instruction for schools. However, since Swahili was politicized as an Islamic language and because it developed negative associations through the Ugandan military’s use of it, English and Luganda are still preferred by many. Nevertheless, the language has become integrated into everyday interactions and is visible in public spaces in emblematic and pragmatic ways (Nassenstein, 2016). These examples of language planning show how language is intricately bound up with the ideologies that people have towards languages and people’s access to linguistic resources. Access to local and global lingua francas has played a central role in this research, particularly in schooling contexts. In Kenya, for example, many studies have explored views towards the use of languages other than English in English-medium classrooms, given the feasibility and usefulness of translanguaging in these contexts. Nonetheless, ideologies that privilege monolingual command of English prevent teachers, administrators, and parents from advocating for more flexibility in communication with students (Kiramba & Harris, 2019).
Language policy and planning in schools Perhaps the most research on East Africa published in the past decade has been on language policy and planning as it relates to education. The predominance of this topic is not surprising given the importance of education in economic development, a concern shared by all of the nations surveyed here. In countries where English is the MOI for primary and/or secondary education, research has focused on both the attitudes towards English as well as empirical studies investigating classroom practices. Most early publications offer descriptive overviews of the historical events that have led to current language policy in education, with more recent work analyzing the ideologies, social actors, and social dynamics involved in these debates (e.g., for Eritrea, see Asfaha, 2015; for Ethiopia, see Yohannes, 2021; for Uganda, see Ngaka, 2021; for South Sudan, see Abdelhay et al., 2011). While earlier research generally used survey and questionnaire research to describe attitudes about policies, this more recent work has employed ethnography, narrative analysis, and case-study approaches to better understand the realities and challenges involved. Ethnographic classroom research reveals the limitations of English as a MOI. In her research with communities in northern Tanzania, Lauwo (2022) found that parents expressed more support for multilingualism in schools than was allowed by policies, and that their viewpoints were shaped strongly by their own educational backgrounds. In contrast, in Uganda, Ssentanda and Nakayiza (2017) saw that despite policies supporting mother tongue education, teachers dispensed with trying to communicate in their students’ languages and began with English. They identified the societal discourses about low English proficiency in social media that ridiculed public figures whose English was not fluent as playing a central role in perpetuating these practices.
Multilingual interactions and social identities A prominent area of research on all African contexts is the study of multilingual discourse in use, also referred to as codeswitching, translanguaging, and heteroglossia, to name just a few of the 385
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current theoretical frameworks invoked in this scholarship. Research on this topic has tended to focus on multilingual practices involving language alternation and linguistic bricolage between local African languages and previously colonial languages, so it is no surprise that a fair amount of this research has been carried out in educational contexts (Lauwo, 2022; Kiramba, 2019; Shartiely, 2016). Much of the recent work in this area describes how multilingual resources are used productively as a means by which teachers signal teacher and student identities, scaffold the learning of new concepts, and invite participation in spite of low proficiency in the MOI. On a broader scale, this research asserts that embracing the fluid use of translanguaging in education can also have a decolonizing effect through challenging the association of high prestige domains such as education with English, and with monoglossic forms of language in multilingual societies. In contexts beyond schooling, multilingual practices and identities have been studied in a number of institutional and mundane contexts. This work builds on seminal contributions by Myers-Scotton (1993), who offered an explanatory framework for the study of multilingual interactions. Through analyzing conversational codeswitching among speakers in Kenyan and other African contexts, Myers-Scotton developed her Markedness Model, a framework which uses rational choice theory to postulate that speakers operate in a world of rights and obligations (ROs). In choosing marked or unmarked codes, speakers consciously choose to violate RO sets in order to achieve a desired outcome, or they may conform to the expected RO set to produce unmarked language. Other research on multilingual interaction has theorized multilingual conversation as acts of identity construction that are socially constructed through discourse. Scholars such as Blommaert (2014, 2005) posited that speakers draw on language ideologies and linguistic resources to express their relationships with social groups in language practices. His research on varieties of Kiswahili and English is relevant for its investigation of how speakers use their various linguistic resources to establish spheres of belonging and social divisions. Similarly, Higgins (2009a) investigates how in contexts such as white-collar workplaces, Tanzanian speakers creatively use their linguistic resources to align with one another and negotiate workplace identities and hierarchies through codeswitching for dispreferred pragmatic actions. In contrast, Billings (2013) examines how language ideologies that valorize monolingual control of Swahili and English are shared by contestants in the context of Tanzanian beauty pageants. In a study drawing on data from Kenya and Zambia, Banda (2020) extends the analysis of multilingual interaction to a multimodal analysis to show how language choices intersect with other social meanings to signal social class differences. Rural community members were frustrated by urban development workers’ use of urban forms of Swahili and other markers of higher social class, such as their ways of dressing and directing people at the events. Banda’s analysis draws attention to how marginalized groups do not acquiesce to unequal social structures and offers an example of how presumably linguistically ‘subordinate’ members of society challenge sociolinguistic norms by questioning the links between class and language prestige and appropriateness. In a similar vein, Higgins (2016) analyzes how indigenous healers in Tanzania speak back against development workers’ ways of using Swahili to diminish their knowledge vis-a-vis the knowledge base of biomedically trained doctors and nurses at a workshop about HIV/AIDS prevention in rural Tanzania. Other researchers who have examined multilingual speech have been interested in describing new forms of language mixing and investigating how these ways of using language are valued by their speakers and in wider society. Githiora (2018) offers a book-length discussion of Sheng, an urban mixed language spoken in Kenya, which includes an investigation into attitudes and ideologies as well as the use of Sheng in everyday interaction, popular culture, and advertising. A key point made by Sheng researchers is that while this language emerged from street life among urban youth, it is now found in all domains of life and is known among a wide range of speakers, 386
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thus challenging received understandings of language in relation to sociolinguistic class, age, and region (Mous & Barasa, 2022). On the other hand, research on the street language of Tanzania, Lugha ya Mitaani (Reuster-Jahn & Kießling, 2006) notes that this variety has more limited range, though it is common in popular music and in casual conversations among urban youth (Higgins, 2009b; Juma, 2017; Reuster-Jahn & Kießling, 2022). Numerous examples of similar language varieties can be found elsewhere in East Africa. In Uganda, Luyaaye has been described as an urban variety of Luganda which has spread into rural areas, the media, and politics (Namyalo, 2015). A youth language based on Amharic called Yarada K’wank’wa, and mainly spoken in Addis Ababa, uses borrowings from English, Arabic, and Jamaican English in speech and digital writing to mark cosmopolitan identities in an everchanging and fluid manner (Nassenstein & Hollington, 2016). Though not exclusively used among youth, another linguistic variety has emerged in Shashamane, Ethiopia, as elements of Jamaican English have been integrated into the speech of repatriated Rastafarians and local community members who practice Rastafarianism and consume and produce Reggae music (Masiola, 2015). While these languages are generally associated with urban youth, further research will be needed to determine to what degree these languages might be normalizing across domains and demographics, as in the case of Sheng.
Linguistic landscapes While research on East African sociolinguistics has expanded to include greater attention to microsociolinguistics through the analysis of discourse in face-to-face contexts and in the media, it has also grown in the area of written modalities, as expressed through the linguistic landscape (LL). LL research began as the study of language on signs, with attention to ethnolinguistic vitality (Landry & Bourhis, 1997), but it has since expanded to the study of social meanings and uses of language in public space. LL research can serve as a site for the study of language attitudes and ideologies through examining how languages are represented in public space, what audiences are invoked, and how social identities are invoked in the process. There are a number of publications on the LL of Ethiopia which explore the use of language on signs in relation to language policies supportive of regional multilingualism. In the regional capital of Mekele, the Tigray regional state, English is prominent but functions primarily as an index of modernity, while Tigrinya and Amharic dominate the signage while also functioning as modes of communication (Lanza & Woldemariam, 2014). However, in Addis Ababa, English is more dominant in signs, but it often features local sentiments and values, thereby indexing an Ethiopian national identity through English (Woldemariam & Lanza, 2014). Similar findings have been noted about the role of English in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (Higgins, 2009a). In cities such as Dodoma, however, the apparent dominance is less clear, as Swahili is equally represented in signs when considering the grammatical frames separately from the lexical use of English (Lusekelo & Mdukula, 2021). Medical and public health contexts have been the focus of LL research, as researchers have sought to understand how health information and public health messaging are conveyed and understood. In Tanzania, Mdukula (2017) investigated how hospital clients understood signage at a major hospital in Dar es Salaam that is mostly in English. In contrast, to ensure that the public receives the messages clearly, billboards in Nairobi use urban vernaculars such as Sheng to promote public health messages about HIV/AIDS prevention Mutonya (2008), and billboards in Dar es Salaam use street Swahili to market mobile phone plans to urban consumers (Higgins, 2009a). Going forward, research on LLs can continue to investigate multilingual practices and language ideologies since the LL can be used as a gauge for the symbolic and pragmatic value of languages. 387
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In addition, future research might take up newer approaches within the field that examine the relationship between language and place more broadly by researching the use of spoken language and other semiotic systems in public spaces, in addition to studying the written expression of languages on signs (cf. Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015).
Research on the diaspora of displaced East Africans Any reader of this chapter will see that much more research is available on Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, relative to Djibouti, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. It is worth pointing out that a fair amount of research has been carried out on the acquisition of new literacy practices as well as language shift among displaced South Sudanese (Burford-Rice et al., 2020; Hatoss, 2022), Somalis (Abdullahi & Li Wei, 2021; King et al., 2017) and Eritreans (e.g. Degu, 2021). Most of this research is situated in the United Kingdom, North America, and Australia and addresses the challenges that these populations face in adapting to Western cultures and English-medium educational environments.
Future directions While this survey of East Africa shows that language policy and educational contexts have been widely researched, and that there is a growing body of micro-sociolinguistic research, there is still a general lack of scholarship that illustrates how languages are used in public and private domains of social life in most of the nations discussed in this chapter. Future research that examines these topics is needed in order to both deepen and widen the scope of sociolinguistic research on East Africa. Of course, research will always remain tied to the availability of funding and publishing opportunities, both of which present daunting challenges for African scholars. It seems clear that economic disparities in the world have led to an imbalance in the amount of research produced in and about developing nations, and the result seems to be that most sociolinguistic research is based on largely monolingual societies and Western languages. Future research on the East African context is needed to address this disparity, not only to more fully represent the social aspects of the world’s languages, but also to provide space for African-based theories of language use and research conducted by African scholars who are members of the communities they study. It is important to more deeply consider how the research we do is informed by members of communities, and also how our research findings in turn benefit these communities as well. Such a shift would be in alignment with scholarly developments embracing southern theory (Santos, 2014) and calls to decolonize research in Africa and elsewhere (Heugh et al., 2021; Rudwick & Makoni, 2021).
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Sociolinguistics in East Africa Billings, S. (2013). Language, globalization and the making of a Tanzanian beauty queen. In Language, Globalization and the Making of a Tanzanian Beauty Queen. Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, J. (2005). Situating language rights: English and Swahili in Tanzania revisited. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9, 390–417. Blommaert, J. (2014). State ideology and language in Tanzania. University of Edinburgh Press. Burford-Rice, R., Augoustinos, M., & Due, C. (2020). ‘That’s what they say in our language: One onion, all smell’: The impact of racism on the resettlement experiences of South Sudanese women in Australia. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(2), 95–109. Degu, Y. A. (2021). Exploring family language policy in action: Child agency and the lived experiences of multilingual Ethiopian and Eritrean families in Sweden. Multilingual Margins: A Journal of Multilingualism from the Periphery, 8(1), 26–51. Eno, M. A., Dammak, A., & Eno, O. A. (2016). From linguistic imperialism to language domination: “Linguicism” and ethno-linguistic politics in Somalia. Journal of Somali Studies: Research on Somalia and the Greater Horn of African Countries, 3(1), 9–52. Fishman, J. (1972). The relationship between micro- and macro-sociolinguistics in the study of who speaks what language to whom and when. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings (pp. 15–32). Penguin Books. Githiora, C. J. (2018). Sheng: Rise of a Kenyan Swahili Vernacular. James Curry. Hatoss, A. (2022). That word “abuse” is a big problem for us: South Sudanese parents’ positioning and agency vis-à-vis parenting conflicts in Australia. Linguistics and Education, 67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. linged.2021.101002. Heugh, K., Stroud, C., Taylor-Leech, K., & De Costa, P. I. (Eds.). (2021). A sociolinguistics of the South. Routledge. Higgins, C. (2009a). English as a local language: Postcolonial identities and multilingual practices. Multilingual Matters. Higgins, C. (2009b). From ‘da bomb’ to bomba: Global Hip Hop nation language in Tanzania. In A. Ibrahim, H. S. Alim, & A. Pennycook (Eds.), Global linguistic flows: Hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language (pp. 95–112). Erlbaum. Higgins, C. (2016). Authorization and illegitimation among biomedical doctors and indigenous healers in Tanzania. Applied Linguistics Review, 7(4), 385–407. Jjingo, C., & Visser, M. (2017). The Ssenteza Kajubi legacy: The promotion of teaching Kiswahili in Uganda. Journal of Pan African Studies, 10(9). Juma, H. K. (2017). Tofauti za Matumizi ya Lugha katika Miktadha mbalimbali ya Mazungumzo. Kioo cha Lugha, 14(1). King, K. A., Bigelow, M., & Hirsi, A. (2017). New to school and new to print: Everyday peer interaction among adolescent high school newcomers. International Multilingual Research Journal, 11(3), 137–151. Kiramba, L. K. (2019). Heteroglossic practices in a multilingual science classroom. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22(4), 445–458. Kiramba, L. K., & Harris, V. J. (2019). Navigating authoritative discourses in a multilingual classroom: Conversations with policy and practice. TESOL Quarterly, 53(2), 456–481. Kishe, A. (2003). Kiswahili as vehicle of unity and development in the Great Lakes region. Language Culture and Curriculum, 16(2), 218–230. Laitin, D. (1977). Politics, language and thought: The Somali experience. University of Chicago Press. Landry, R., & Bourhis, R. Y. (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), 23–49. Lanza, E., & Woldemariam, H. (2014). Indexing modernity: English and branding in the linguistic landscape of Addis Ababa. International Journal of Bilingualism, 18(5), 491–506. Lauwo, M. S. (2022). Language ideologies in multilingual Tanzania: Parental discourses, school realities, and contested visions of schooling. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 43(7), 679–693. Lusekelo, A., & Mdukula, P. C. (2021). The linguistic landscape of Urban Tanzania in Dodoma City. Utafiti, 16(1), 63–94. Mandillah, L. (2019). Kenyan curriculum reforms and mother tongue education: Issues, challenges and implementation strategies. Education as Change, 23(1), 1–18. Manfredi, S., & Tosco, M. (2018). Juba Arabic (ÁRABI JÚBA): A ‘less indigenous’ language of South Sudan. Sociolinguistic Studies, 12(2), 209–230. Masiola, R. (2015). Jamaican Speech forms in Ethiopia: The emergence of a new linguistic scenario in Shashamane. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
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Christina Higgins Mdukula, P. C. (2017). The linguistic landscape of Muhimbili National Hospital in Tanzania: Its implication for access to information. Journal of Linguistics and Language in Education, 11(2), 87–108. Mous, M., & Barasa, S. (2022). Kenya: Sheng and Engsh. In P. Kerswill & H. Weiss (Eds.), Urban contact dialects and language change (pp. 105–124). Routledge. Mutembei, A. K. (2014). African languages as a gateway to sustainable development, democracy and freedom: The example of Swahili. Alternation, 13, 326–351. Mutonya, M. (2008). Swahili advertising in Nairobi: Innovation and language shift. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 20, 3–14. Myers-Scotton, C. (1993). Social motivations for codeswitching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford University Press. Namyalo, S. (2015). Linguistic strategies in Luyaaye: Word play and conscious language manipulation. In N. Nassenstein & A. Hollington (Eds.), Youth language practices in Africa and beyond (pp. 313–344). Mouton de Gruyter. Namyalo, S., & Nakayiza, J. (2015). Dilemmas in implementing language rights in multilingual Uganda. Current Issues in Language Planning, 16(4), 409–424. Nassenstein, N. (2016). The metrolingual use of Swahili in urban Ugandan landscapes and everyday conversation. Voices from Around the World, 1(2016). Nassenstein, N., & Hollington, A. (2016). Global repertoires and urban fluidity: Youth languages in Africa. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 242, 171–193. Ngaka, W. (2021). The role of communities in Uganda’s mother tongue-based education: Perspectives from a literacy learning enhancement project in Arua district. Applied Linguistics Review, 12(4), 545–563. Onyango, J. O. (2018). From social history to attitudes towards use of Kiswahili in Kenya. Coretrain Journal of Languages, Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, 1, 18–189. Pennycook, A., & Otsuji, E. (2015). Metrolingualism: Language in the city. Routledge. Reuster-Jahn, U., & Kießling, R. (2006). Lugha ya mitaani in Tanzania: The poetics and sociology of a young urban style of speaking with a dictionary comprising 1100 words and phrases. Swahili Forum, 13, 1–200. Reuster-Jahn, U., & Kießling, R. (2022). Tanzania: Lugha ya Mitaani. In P. Kerswill & H. Weise (Eds.), Urban contact dialects and language change (pp. 167–185). Routledge. Rosendal, T. (2017). Identity construction and norms of practice among bilingual Ngoni in rural Tanzania. Language Matters, 48(2), 3–24. Rudwick, S., & Makoni, S. (2021). Southernizing and decolonizing the sociology of language: African scholarship matters. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 267–268, 259–263. Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Taylor & Francis. Shartiely, N. E. (2016). Code-switching in university classroom interaction: A case study of the University of Dar es Salaam. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 49(1), 215–231. Spronk, T. (2014). Addressing the challenges of language choice in the implementation of mother-tongue based bilingual education in South Sudan. Multilingual Education, 4(1), 1–10. Ssentanda, M. E., & Nakayiza, J. (2017). “Without English there is no future”: The case of language attitudes and ideologies in Uganda. In A. E. Ebongue & E. Hurst (Eds.), Sociolinguistics in African contexts (pp. 107–126). Springer. Woldemariam, H, & Lanza, E. (2014). Language contact, agency and power in the linguistic landscape of two regional capitals of Ethiopia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 228, 79–103. Woldemikael, T. M. (2003). Language, education, and public policy in Eritrea. African Studies Review, 46(1), 117–136. Yohannes, M. A. G. (2021). Language policy in Ethiopia: The interplay between policy and practice in Tigray Regional State. Springer Nature.
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33 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN LUSOPHONE AFRICA Laura Álvarez López
Introduction Since their independence from Portugal in 1974 and 1975, Portuguese has been the official language of the Republics of Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe. In 2007, the language also became official in Equatorial Guinea, besides Spanish and French.1 Although they are often referred to as Lusophone Africa (i.e., Portuguese-speaking) or PALOP (Países africanos de língua oficial portuguesa, literally meaning “African countries where Portuguese is the official language”), these countries are diverse and multilingual regions. The term “Lusophone” derives from Lusitânia, an inland west region of the Iberian Peninsula inhabited by the Lusitanians – one of the pre-Roman Iberian peoples. Clearly, both the designation of PALOP and the association with Lusophony highlight, as their main linguistic characteristic, the fact that these five countries were colonized by Portugal, and their government chose the colonizers’ language as the official language, which may lead to the inaccurate assumption that Portuguese is the first language of most of the inhabitants in all these territories (cf. Bermingham et al., 2021, p. 94; Figueira, 2013, p. 19). This chapter offers an overview centered on recent sociolinguistic studies with a focus on Portuguese, including the widely spoken Portuguese-lexified creoles of Africa. The specific field of African linguistics has been left out because it is largely focused on linguistic description and standardization and not on sociolinguistic research. In addition, works in the field of African studies in the Portuguese ex-colonies have been summarized by Fehn (2019). Nonetheless, the role of African languages is frequently considered in the literature concerning all aspects of language-in-education.2 The first section of this chapter will present a brief literature review consisting primarily of studies about language contact, variation and bi-/multilingualism with an emphasis on Portugueselexified creoles and African varieties of Portuguese. Whereas previous scholarship on those creoles includes grammars and descriptions of sound patterns and provides a basis for a good understanding of their linguistic features, the sociolinguistic aspects studied are usually restricted to sociohistorical and comparative approaches. Regarding African varieties of Portuguese, most work has been undertaken in educational settings and in the fields of second language acquisition and language teaching and learning, nonetheless several studies use Labovian or other sociolinguistic 391
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methodologies and will be summarized. The second section will turn its focus to recurring topics related to language and power that have concerned numerous African sociolinguists (but not exclusively African) during the last decade and can be applied to language-in-education and general language policies. The chapter closes by pointing out selected topics that merit further study.
Language contact, variation and bi-/multilingualism from a sociohistorical perspective The Portuguese ex-colonies in Africa never developed as settlement colonies. Therefore, the presence of speakers of European Portuguese in Africa was rather limited until the colonies became “overseas provinces” in 1951 and “novel politics of demographic colonization emerged” (Jerónimo, 2018, pp. 17–18), and yet this presence was still marginal as regards the overall picture. Moreover, the history of language contacts in these countries involves at least two distinct situations. Whereas in Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Guinea-Bissau, Portuguese-lexified creoles emerged during the first centuries of colonization and are still widely spoken besides the official language, in Angola and Mozambique there are no creoles and most Portuguese speakers also speak languages classified as Bantu or have regular contacts with speakers of those languages.3
Portuguese-lexified creoles The varieties of the nine inhabited islands of Cabo Verde are the first language of practically the entire population and are referred to as Kabuverdianu or Kriolu. Based on rich documentation about bilingual speakers’ profiles as well as their reported use and attitudes toward their two languages, Cabo Verdean linguist Amália Lopes (2016, 2018, p. 161) labels the sociolinguistic reality in the islands as “forced” and “complex diglossia, mainly based on the distinction between the oral and the written modes, in which PT [Portuguese] is the high language and CV [Cabo Verdean] the low one”. The creole varieties of Cabo Verde share their origins with the Portuguese-lexified Kriol, spoken in Guinea-Bissau by approximately half the population, as documented by Ndao (2017, p. 301), and the Kriyol of Casamance, in southern Senegal, where the official language is French and not Portuguese. On both sides of the border between Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, creole speakers also speak various West African languages mainly classified as Atlantic or Mande, and the creole frequently serves as a lingua franca (Eberhard et al., 2022). Although few sociolinguistic studies about creoles have been carried out in this linguistically diverse region, Smith (2020) offers a brief outline for a planned linguistic mapping, including sociolinguistic surveys in Guinea-Bissau. Moreover, in a study based on extensive ethnographic field work in Guinea-Bissau, Kohl (2018) discusses how Kriol is associated with a group defined as Kristons, and the way this group identifies with diverse African cultural features and identities in a very integrative way is seen as the reason why the creole language is spreading countrywide. Moreover, Nunez and Léglise (2017) propose advanced methods for the annotation of transcriptions considering the complexity of multilingual practices which, according to the authors, reflect social and sociolinguistic development among creole speakers in Senegal. The Creole varieties discussed earlier are often referred to as Upper Guinea creoles, in contrast to the Portuguese-lexified Gulf of Guinea creoles spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe and in Equatorial Guinea. In São Tomé and Príncipe there are three different creoles, Angolar, Lung’ie and Santome (also called Forro). In addition, Kriolu is spoken among descendants of contracted workers from Cabo Verde who arrived in the island during the first half of the 20th century (Hagemeijer, 2018). Here, the sociolinguistic situation is described as “relatively stable diglossia inherited from 392
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the colonial period, in which Portuguese was used more commonly in the high domains and Santome in the low domains” (Hagemeijer, 2018, p. 179). Newly obtained results of studies that show a concern for attitudes and negotiation of new identities in São Tomé and Príncipe are presented by Bouchard (2019, 2022) and Agostinho et al. (2016) respectively. Their work has explored identity construction among speakers of Lung’ie in Príncipe and the role of language ideologies in São Tomé in relation to the vitality of Angolar. Both studies are based on interviews or surveys with several participants, and elucidate how individual language choices are influenced by extralinguistic factors. The careful contextualization of their results contributes to the understanding of the ongoing processes of shift and goes beyond processes of collective shift toward European varieties and the resulting endangerment and possible death of minority languages in Africa. In the island of Príncipe, the results indicate that attitudes toward Lung’ie are more positive than before, and the results from São Tomé reveal that out-group attitudes are relevant when assessing the vitality of a specific variety. Finally, Hagemeijer and Zamora (2016) describe the historical and sociolinguistic evolution of the language of a small community of speakers of Fa d’Ambô, another Portuguese-lexified creole, mainly spoken in the islands of Annobón and Bioko, in Equatorial Guinea. Due to the lack of institutional support, the authors see Fa d’Ambô’s survival as threatened. Besides the aforementioned publications, numerous significant papers about Portugueselexified creoles have been published and reviewed by international scholars in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Journal of Ibero-Romance Creoles and, to some extent, in the Brazilian journal Papia. Much of this work has regularly been reported and discussed at conferences organized by the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics and by the Association of Portuguese and Spanish-Lexified Creoles.
African varieties of Portuguese Concerning African varieties of Portuguese, three volumes published in recent years include formal and comparative, but also sociohistorical approaches to varieties spoken in the ex-colonies. These are The Portuguese language continuum in Africa and Brazil (Álvarez López et al., 2018), Duas Variedades Africanas do Português: Variáveis Fonético-Fonológicas e Morfossintáticas (Brandão, 2018) and O Português na África Atlântica (Oliveira & Araújo, 2019). Additionally, the PhD theses authored by Figueiredo (2010) and Jon-And (2011) are full-length studies of nominal agreement in Cabo Verde, Mozambique and São Tomé. In addition, Bouchard’s (2017) doctoral thesis includes variationist analyses of variable subject pronoun expression and use of rhotics in São Tomé, and Pissurno’s (2017) thesis deals with verbal agreement in Mozambique. Furthermore, a series of shorter variationist studies have described, analyzed and proposed diverse explanations for variable patterns observed in African varieties of Portuguese: variable nominal and verbal agreement (Araújo & Lucchesi, 2016; Brandão, 2013; Brandão & Vieira, 2018; Lopes & Baxter, 2011; Vieira & Bazenga, 2013), variable use of definite articles (Figueiredo, 2019; Gomes & Cordeiro, 2021; Álvarez López & Marttinen Larsson, forthcoming, 2023), variable use of the verbs ter (“to have”) and haver (“to exist”) in existential constructions (Araújo and Dantas, 2017) and variable use of pronouns (Araújo & Silva, 2018; Caetano & Vieira, 2021; Figueiredo & Oliveira, 2013; Veríssimo, 2017). Given that education is offered almost exclusively in the official language, and that the official norm is standard European Portuguese, it is hardly surprising that, in general, the results of these studies concur in identifying the number of years in school or level of education as a significant social factor when predicting variability. It is worth noting that variationist methodologies are apparently not being applied by researchers who are based in Africa on a permanent basis (such studies are more common among Brazilian 393
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sociolinguists, many of whom have specialized in African varieties of Portuguese). However, richly documented sociolinguistic accounts of attitudes toward Portuguese, Portuguese lexically based creoles and Bantu languages have been presented by sociolinguists currently working at African universities. The analyses of the 1,780 questionnaires collected by Lopes (2016)4 for her doctoral thesis indicate that, despite the status of Portuguese, bilingual speakers still have positive attitudes toward Kriolu and will continue to speak it with their children. Similarly, in Angola, 70% of the 300 respondents addressed by Nzau (2011) in his doctoral thesis were favorable towards bilingual schools, and 71% declared that they would not give up African languages and only speak Portuguese. In the same way, Langa (2019), who published a study based on answers from 270 bilingual students in three Mozambican cities, reports on youths’ pride in and desire to maintain their Bantu languages.
Applied African sociolinguistics Wolff (2018) points out that, since the 1990s, a new field that he refers to as “applied African sociolinguistics” has raised questions related to language and development in multilingual settings. The main areas of interest within this tradition have been, among others, issues that can be related to language and power, such as the status and vitality of the official European variety on one hand, and the status and maintenance (or loss) of African languages and Portuguese lexically based creoles on the other, as well as the implementation of language-in-education policies. Languages are understood as resources, and diversity as something positive. In that sense, language issues are recurrently discussed in connection to economic and social development, democracy, linguistic citizenship and social justice (see, for example, Chimbutane, 2018a; Mendes, 2018; Mabasso, 2021; Stroud, 2018). In other words, applied African sociolinguistics deals with “speakers of language(s) and how they use (or do not use) language(s) as resource(s) in everyday life, and whether this use is to the benefit or detriment of social, political, and economic development” (Wolff, 2018, p. 923). One of the main concerns within this tradition in the Portuguese ex-colonies has been the increased use of the official language and its consequences. Insights into language policy and planning in Portuguese ex-colonies suggest that the “unsuccessful language policies in the Portuguese colonies [and successor states] have contributed to the low level of development” and claim that there is a need for a “a language policy that recognizes diversity and multilingualism” (Spolsky, 2018, p. 89). Figures from population censuses indicate a growing percentage of speakers reporting that Portuguese is their first language in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe (Firmino, 2011, 2021; Hagemeijer, 2018, p. 178; INE, 2014, 2016, 2019; Instituto Nacional de Estatística e Censos, 1996; Inverno, 2018, p. 117; Kohl, 2018, p. 158). Here, it should be noted that Cabo Verde stands out since Kriolu is the language spoken at home by the majority, although individuals usually learn the official language formally in school and, in fact, 73% of the population older than 12 were reported to speak Portuguese in 2015 (INE, 2017). The testified tendencies of shift toward the official language certainly have manifold reasons in diverse settings, some of which are postcolonial internal migrations during armed conflicts and processes of urbanization and subsequent demographic changes, as well as the extensive expansion of education and the Portuguese-centered language-in-education and general language policies implemented after independence. Furthermore, research has shown that there is much diversity within the Portuguese ex-colonies, and within many African countries, where bilingual education might be offered locally in various forms and where rural areas often are more “afrophone” than urban centers, as pointed out by Wolff for various African settings (2018, p. 910). 394
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These differences are confirmed by population censuses in the African countries where Portuguese has an official status. These censuses also reveal differences in terms of level of education, indicating higher levels of education in urban settings, where schools are generally more accessible. Serving as a lingua franca among speakers of different languages, Portuguese has often, but not always, been associated with positive values and considered the language of national unity and a tool for international communication and access to information (cf., among others, Bouchard, 2019; Chimbutane, 2018b; Couto, 2009; Lopes, 2018; Nzau, 2011). In addition, the implementation of education reforms after the new republics’ independence has contributed to language shift. Nevertheless, in Cabo Verde it is Kriolu and not Portuguese that represents the language of unity, and in Guinea-Bissau, Kriolo is the main lingua franca among speakers of different African varieties (Bermingham et al., 2021; Kohl, 2018). In that sense, the “overlap between schooling and Portuguese language teaching” discussed by Severo et al. (2019, p. 303) in relation to the Angolan situation can be extended to other settings and represents a common denominator in all African countries where Portuguese has an exclusive official status (cf. Chimbutane, 2018b). In sum, Portuguese has highly positive symbolic value because it offers access to literacy and globalization and, at the same time, it excludes part of the population from the same privileges. In a way, the official language is “over valorized” in society if compared to other languages. In line with this research tradition, this situation can be related to language and power and might lead to “marginalization and voice deprivation” for those who “are not in a position to fully function as national citizens through the official language” (Chiatoh, 2018, p. 83; Stroud, 2018; Wolff, 2018, p. 914). Summing up, language policy and planning, standardization, language-in-education policies, bilingual education and related issues in Portuguese ex-colonies in Africa have most recently been discussed from different perspectives in studies published in a number of journals and volumes by sociolinguists from different parts of the world (Afonso & Santos, 2021; Beckert, 2020; Bermingham et al., 2021; Bernardo & Severo, 2018; Bila, 2021; Dias, 2021; Firmino, 2021; Gundane, 2019; Manuel & Johnson, 2018; Pandim, 2020; Pinto & Melo-Pfiffer, 2018; Severo & Makoni, 2020, among other publications). There are also examples of full-length studies, such as the doctoral dissertations defended by Chicumba (2019), Guissemo (2018) and Reite (2019). Overall, their results have the potential of informing future language policies, for example, by incentivizing investments in further research with focus on multilingualism or problematizing the adoption of an exogenous official norm (European standard Portuguese).
Final remarks Bearing in mind the amount of work that has been done about language in the African countries where Portuguese has been given official status, this chapter can be an inspirational contribution for new generations of linguists. Supplementary work is needed in many areas and about a great number of topics that should be considered by educators and language planners, but also by parents and their children in general. As this chapter has shown, recent research has begun to emphasize the importance of the need to develop language and educational policies by undertaking investigation that can inform initiatives within teacher training, as well as implementing bilingual educational programs that have relevance for and support from the communities in the local context. In a longterm perspective, such approaches might help to inform policies that can succeed in “managing linguistic diversity and promoting democratic practice through careful management of differences as the platform for dismantling inequalities and enabling citizens to find their voices in matters of public policy” (Chiatoh, 2018, p. 83). Furthermore, there are very few detailed studies on early childhood acquisition and the use of several languages in school or language learning in informal 395
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settings, and only a limited number of studies deal with attitudes toward languages regularly used in those settings. In sum, there is an overall need for more knowledge about the languages spoken in Portugal’s ex-colonies and particularly about the social factors that surround the increasing or decreasing use of those languages by different groups of speakers in various settings.
Notes 1 In a rare publication about language use and attitudes in Equatorial Guinea, Gomashie (2019) reports that Spanish is the most spoken language in the country and that the use of Portuguese is limited. 2 Supplementary bibliographies of publications from within all fields of linguistics and dealing with African varieties of Portuguese can be found on a website hosted and regularly updated by the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo www.catedraportugues.uem.mz. These include masters’ and doctoral dissertations and were mainly produced in Angola, Mozambique, Portugal and Brazil. It is worth noting that the number of publications concerning Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau is very limited. 3 According to Eberhard et al. (2022) there are also a limited number of speakers of Kwedam (classified as Khoe) and Kung-Ekoka (classified as Kx’a, !Kung) in Angola. 4 This important work was defended as a doctoral dissertation in Lisbon in 2011, and later published as a book in Cabo Verde in 2016.
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34 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA Susanne Mohr, Irina Turner and Sibonile E. Ellece
Introduction In a recent survey of three international sociolinguistics journals, Djité (2021) finds that sociolinguistic research output in southern Africa in general is low. Investigating possible reasons in more detail, he finds that most researchers lack motivation for research, which in turn is due to inadequate research and working conditions, such as high professor-student ratios, or the unfair allocation of funds (Djité, 2021, p. 94). Despite these struggles, there is in fact a sizable body of sociolinguistic research from and on southern Africa, defined for the purposes of this handbook as Botswana, Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. This research covers a variety of topics, such as language planning and policy, multilingualism, or language and gender, which we discuss in the following. Our overview considers linguistic research published in English and French after 2008 to provide a recent account of contemporary research but could not include other African or European languages, for instance. We employed a data-driven approach for our chapter, selecting themes emerging from the literature – this however means that not all countries are covered in all sections. In this way, we also provide an overview of research beyond long-standing traditions in sociolinguistic research in sub-Saharan Africa, which often focused on contrastive analyses of local vs. (former) colonial languages, language endangerment and death. This is in line with a broad conceptualization of sociolinguistics (Mesthrie, 2010) and the idea that modern African sociolinguistic research “should not reproduce the western neo-liberal and exclusionary knowledge ‘bias’ and power hierarchies that ignore the dynamism and vitality of local languages” but rather emanate from “the inner workings” of multilingual “lived language experiences” (Djité, 2021, pp. 95–96). We show in the following that research on and from southern Africa is well on its way to furthering an understanding of these experiences.
Language situation in southern Africa Southern African countries are characterized by multilingualism and multiculturalism, but often one or two languages are given official status. DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-39 400
Sociolinguistics in southern Africa
In Botswana, with a population of 2.5 million, there are 26–29 languages (Alimi, 2011, p. 310). Setswana, spoken by about 77% of the population, is the national language, and English, spoken by about 3% of the population, is the official language confined to a tiny minority of an educated, mainly urban population (World Factbook – Botswana, 2022). Several minority languages, including what has been termed Khoesan languages, are spoken by about 5% of the population. Eswatini has an estimated population of about 1.1 million (World Factbook – Eswatini, 2022). English and Siswati are both official languages, and English is a prerequisite for entry into institutions of higher learning (Kunene & Mthethwa, 2020), suggesting that even though officially they have the same status, English is more valued than Siswati in practice. With a population of just 2.1 million (Hobbs, 2022), Lesotho has two main languages spoken in the country: Sesotho, the national language, and English, the official language. Because of its relatively small population and small size, it is seen to be linguistically homogeneous by some scholars (e.g., Kamwangamalu, 2012, p. 156), while others stress its inherent linguistic diversity (e.g., Shah, 2019). A former French colony, Madagascar has 27.7 million inhabitants, and Malagasy, spoken by 25 million people, is the official language, alongside French. There are three major dialects in the country: northern, eastern and southwestern Malagasy (Serva & Pasquini, 2020), and English is spoken by ca. 8% of the population (World Factbook – Madagascar, 2022). Malawi’s population is projected to reach 19.5 million by 2022, with up to 15 languages spoken in the country. Chichewa is the politically dominant indigenous language, which was historically imposed as a lingua franca and enjoys national language status. English is the official language (Chikaipa & Gunde, 2021). Namibia has a population of ca. 2.5 million who speak 13 languages, three of which are of European origin: German, Afrikaans, and English. During the colonial period, German, and later Afrikaans, were the official languages (Buschfeld & Schröder, 2020). After independence, English became the official language even though it had no colonial ties with the country (Stell, 2021). Zambia has a population of 20.2 million (World Factbook – Zambia, 2023). It is multiethnic and multilingual with estimations of up to 80 languages (Nojea, 2018). Twenty-six clusters of Bantu languages as well as so-called Khoesan, European, and Indian languages are spoken. There are seven national languages: Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, Lozi, Lunda, Luvale, and Kaonde (Nojea, 2018). Although English is used as a first language by only 1.7% of the population, it is spoken by over 26% as a second language, making its use second only to Bemba at 30% (Mwanza, 2017). Zimbabwe’s population was around 14.8 million in 2021 (World Factbook – Zimbabwe, 2022). English, Shona, and Ndebele are the official national languages (Ndlovu, 2013). Shona is spoken by 70%–75% of the population while Ndebele is spoken by 15%–20%. “Kalanga, Tonga, Sotho, Venda, Nambya and Shangan are official minority languages” (Ndlovu, 2013, p. 1).
Language policy and planning The literature on language policy and planning in the countries profiled here is largely interrogative in nature. English dominates the formal sphere as the language of administration, politics, business, education, and international communication and has official language status in most of these countries. It is often perceived as a threat to indigenous languages (Makoni, 2011a). In Botswana, studies focus on how the preference of English and Setswana in the education system has negatively affected learners from ethnic minorities (Boikhutso & Jotia, 2013; Mokibelo, 2014, 2016). Before independence, the dominance of Setswana and English resulted from common practice rather than written policy or legislation (Bagwasi, 2021). Post-independence, 401
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the Botswana government introduced Setswana as a national, and English as an official language. Other languages were sidelined (Mokibelo, 2014), and mother tongue education in schools was resisted (Boikhutso & Jotia, 2013). Only recently, the president commissioned a group of experts to explore ways of introducing mother tongues into the education system (Piet, 2021, July 19). Thus, marginalization of minority languages in Botswana’s education system features prominently in language planning and policy literature (Mokibelo, 2014; Boikhutso & Jotia, 2013), discussing for example the reproach of a constitutionally enshrined anti-minority agenda through assimilationist language policy (Nyati-Ramahobo, 2000). The literature also addresses issues of a prescribed Standard British model vis-a-vis local varieties of English (Alimi, 2011), the nature of Botswana’s multilingualism, and the socio-political pressures that shape it (Bagwasi, 2017, 2021). In Zambia, the Education Act of 1966 imposed English as the only language of instruction at all levels of education (Nojea, 2018) and reaffirmed it in 1977 as the only language of instruction after primary school. Although English is a high-status language, Zambian languages exhibit resilience and adaptability, and much of the literature covers the phenomena of language vitality, and thriving complex multilingual and delocalized heteroglossic language practices (Banda & Jimaima, 2017; Nojea, 2018; Simungala & Jimaima, 2021a). This is similar in Malawi, where English and Chichewa are the official and national languages respectively, but other indigenous languages are promoted in public media contributing to their vitality (Chikaipa & Gunde, 2021). In Eswatini, studies concentrate on language attitudes and effects on learner performance in literacy education (Lukhele, 2013; Dlamini & Sheik, 2019). In Lesotho, the focus is on the threat (to the Sesotho language) posed by English in the country, and other African languages in the diaspora (Mokuoane & Moeketsi, 2018). Since Zimbabwe also prioritizes Shona and Ndebele, the literature focuses on the effects of language planning and policy on other minority languages (Makoni, 2011a; Kufakunesu, 2017; Gotosa, 2020). Namibia is unique in that all its indigenous languages have a place in the education system, including two so-called Khoesan languages. Yet English is still perceived as a threat to indigenous languages. Studies show that with the rise of English to official status, there are emerging local varieties (Steigertahl, 2019; Schröder, 2021) as well as local urban vernaculars, especially among the youth (Stell, 2020), and some studies report on variational pragmatics (Schröder & Schneider, 2018). Further, Stell studied phonetic variation and its resulting power dynamics in the use of Afrikaans across ethnicities (Stell, 2021).
Applied studies in education English remains the dominant language in most schools and universities in those southern African countries with an English colonial history. This regularly clashes with multilingual spoken realities and epistemologies contained in local African languages as outlined earlier. Hence, a bulk of applied studies is concerned with the tensions arising from English imposition vs. local learners’ and students’ needs and actions. Steigertahl (2019) comprehensively analyzes structures, implications, and attitudes towards Black Namibian English(es) after the country’s independence in the secondary school classroom. Not only learners’ but also teachers’ roles and agency are taken into account, e.g., by Nhongo et al. (2017) for Zimbabwe, Mwanza (2017) for Zambia, or Mthethwa (2014) for Eswatini. And while sociolinguists often tend to conduct research in the fields of the humanities, multilingual strategies in mathematics and the sciences are also explored, e.g., for Zimbabwe by Nhlanhla and Zhou (2015), for Namibia by Nahole and Haimbodi (2022). 402
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Van Staden (2016) explores bilingual reading strategies in Lesotho. Dludlu (2020) emphasizes the importance of code-switching during teaching in Eswatini classrooms, while some older studies set in Eswatini’s school contexts, exploring e.g., pedagogy and learning tools (Titone et al., 2012; Pierson, 2015), literacy development, and code-switching (Dlamini & Sheik, 2019), suggest English as the uncontested standard. The tensions carry on in the realm of higher education as applied studies show in Lesotho (Muringani, 2015; Kolobe & Thetso, 2019), Malawi (Reilly, 2021), Zambia (Simungala & Jimaima, 2021a), and Eswatini (Lukhele, 2013). Digital teaching in linguistics is increasingly important but also ambiguous as Mbukusa (2018) shows for Namibian higher education. Unlike many other countries in southern Africa, Madagascar traditionally has a linguistic setup dominated by French, and increasingly by English (Randriamarotsimba, 2012). Nevertheless, power tensions arising from multilingual diversity are comparable to other countries of southern Africa. Bloch (2020, p. 2) describes how social inequalities are mirrored in linguistic power struggles in Malagasy higher education. Finally, the fact that multilingual realities of speakers are highly context-dependent, is highlighted by Weber et al. (2015), who find that Anglocentric language assessment tools are not easily translatable into any given setting, in this case Malagasy.
Multilingualism and language contact In southern Africa, “mixed codes, rural or indigenous forms of language, urban vernaculars, and English are critical components of the multilingual dispensation which has replaced monolingualism as the norm” (Banda & Bellononjengele, 2010, p. 110). This has important implications for and is visible in different situations of everyday life, as described for example by Sobane (2013) for health communication in Lesotho or by Kamanga (2014, 2019) in the description of Chibrazi, an urban youth language practice of Malawi. The name of this youth language practice (it consists of the prefix chi- “the language of . . . group” and brazi, a local vernacularization of English brother, see Kamanga, 2019, p. 19) was coined by researchers. The performative character of practices like these relates to the applicability of the concept “language” as bounded entity, especially in Africa (see Makoni, 2011b), and emphasizes the need to define multilingualism as praxis, “which social actors draw upon to stylize their identities” (Simungala & Jimaima, 2021a, pp. 2–3). Accounts of dynamic language practices, such as translanguaging among students in Malawian universities (Reilly, 2021) or in Zambian Facebook groups (Simungala & Jimaima, 2021a), the creative and group-membership enhancing use of Sesotho and English among university students in Lesotho (Kolobe & Thetso, 2019), or the use of the Namibian youth language Kasietaal in lowincome areas in Windhoek (Stell, 2020) are cases in point. Multilingual and multilectal behaviors are hence an important part of southern African realities, especially regarding the indication of social distinctions, as described by Stell (2019), reporting the use of code-switching among various ethnic groups and the linguistic performance of urban and ethnic identities in Namibia. These language behaviors hence have stylistic potential and are connected to social factors like education, age, and geographical mobility (see, e.g., Ohannessian & Kashoki, 2019 on Zambia), be it in the physical or in the digital space.
Language variation Not much research on sociolinguistic variation in a classical Labovian framework exists for the languages of southern Africa (see also Mesthrie, 2010). This is due to the fact that these multilingual 403
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settings frequently require different tools and approaches as compared to situations in which one language dominates in a state (Mesthrie, 2010). Some work, especially on the former colonial languages, however, exists. Much of it is situated within a World Englishes paradigm, which describes and analyzes the status, function and characteristics of varieties of English worldwide (Mesthrie & Bhatt, 2008). Nojea (2018), for example, discusses the distinct Zambian variety of English and mentions several particular Zambianisms, e.g., to release an album, meaning “to give birth” or remix, “a lie” (Nojea, 2018, p. 346). Similarly, Alimi (2011) assumes a distinct variety of Botswana English based on a sizable body of literature, much of which focuses on the lexical level and words or phrases specific to the variety. One of the most recent and comprehensive accounts of different areas of language variation regarding English in Namibia is Schröder (2021). Schröder and Schneider (2018) discuss Namibian English from a variational pragmatics perspective, with regard to different speech acts, such as responses to thanks. Stell (2021) discusses phonetic variation in Namibian Afrikaans and ideologies connected with it. Apart from Englishes, we find some work on Malagasy dialects, with Serva et al. (2012) commenting on the history and development of those dialects, drawing on lexicostatistics and glottochronology. The results indicate two main geographical subgroups: southwest versus centernortheast (Serva et al., 2012), which might be due to geography or population division under colonization (see also Serva & Pasquini, 2020). Sommer (2017) analyzes variation and multilingual practices in and around Shiyeyi (spoken in the Caprivi strip) and Sommer and Widlock (2013) investigate variation and contemporary contact effects within the so-called Khoesan languages.
Language and gender Language and gender scholarship in southern Africa has not been well explored save for a few exceptions. For example, Nojea (2018) observes a higher multilingual competency in English and local languages among Zambian men due to their comparatively longer educational period and engagement in employment contexts. Letsholo (2013) examined gendered linguistic interactive language practices between teacherto-child and child-to-child in a pre-school educational setting in Gaborone and found teachers selecting “gender appropriate” tasks for boys and girls with the children sometimes resisting these assigned gender roles. Ellece, among others, studied gender and language within the social institution of marriage and demonstrated how language use in weddings and related rituals, articulates, reproduces, and challenges gendered ideologies that construct women as domestic, sources of unpaid labor, procreators, and nurturers (Ellece, 2011, 2012; Atanga et al., 2013). Ellece (2013) examined, from a discourse analysis perspective, how gender inequality affects men from poor backgrounds who, because of financial disadvantage, lack symbolic resources, feel emasculated and experience an identity crisis that leads to antisocial behavior, including violence. Ellece and Rapoo (2013) examine gendered ideologies (expressed in language) and campaigns against gender-based violence in Botswana and argue that such campaigns marginalize men who are a significant part of the problem and could be part of the solution.
Anthropological linguistics and further disciplinary fringes Sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics are closely connected, with the former analyzing language unfolding in its social contexts, the latter observing the intersection of language and culture. This research in African contexts has a long history of transgressing disciplinary boundaries and exploring 404
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decolonizing discourses (e.g., Zhou, 2015). Operating in a critical development/ethnological framework, Beck (2011), for instance, took a decolonial conversation/discourse analysis approach to study conversation and negotiation dynamics among the Herero in Namibia (see also Bearth et al., 2014). With the decolonial turn in particular (Grosfoguel, 2007), sociolinguistic studies explore African epistemologies contained in language and cultural expressions. In the framework of language revitalization, Martins and Phafoli (2015) examine, for instance, metaphors in Basotho accordion lyrics and Mpofu (2021) explores the impact of Nollywood in the form of “Nigerian Lingo” in Zimbabwean everyday language. Mainly from Lesotho, studies emerge on Basotho names in speech acts (Ekanjume-Ilongo et al., 2020), or Sesotho personal names (Mokhathi-Mbhele, 2020). A topic that emerges as central from our data is linguistic landscaping, focusing on multilingual spaces which provide insights into language ideological processes and can serve as a semiotic lens for studying language vitality and endangerment (Banda & Jimaima, 2017). This is a research topic that has specifically been explored regarding Zambia, where, for instance, the linguistic landscapes of Livingstone and Lusaka were discussed (e.g., Banda & Jimaima, 2017; Jimaima, 2016). These studies focus on the narration of place, the distinctions between peri-urban and rural spaces “to gain insight into the social structuring of language and the mobility of semiotic resources” (Jimaima, 2016, p. ii), and the use of minority and non-official languages, thus providing ideas for language revitalization. More recent research explores the linguistic landscape at the University of Zambia, examining for instance hostel names and their relation to politics (Simungala & Jimaima, 2021b) or comparing offline and online linguistic landscapes, focusing particularly on English and Bemba mixing and translanguaging (Simungala & Jimaima, 2021a). Rasoloniaina & Gueunier (2010) observed similar phenomena in Madagascar, where French and Malagasy, and different varieties of these two, are used on public signs. Another anthropological topic in the broader sense and standing in a long but sometimes underexplored tradition in African linguistics (e.g., Veit-Wild & Vierke, 2017), is the analysis of literary texts, which often serve as corpora for sociolinguistic inquiries. While for instance Seepheephe and Makha-Ntlaloe (2020) take a discourse approach to examine metaphor translation in Sesotho novels, Landa and Zhou (2021) explore humor as a coping strategy employed in Zimbabwean novels. Religion and language is another important anthropological aspect observed by sociolinguists. The Pentecostal movement in Zimbabwe, for instance, is critically examined from a linguistic perspective in several interdisciplinary studies (Landa et al., 2019; Zhou & Landa, 2020). There is a close connection between popular culture and political communication as, for instance, explored by Jackson’s (2013) study on political oratory and its implications for democracy in Madagascar, or by Sacks (2021) who describes how WhatsApp poetry groups contributed to the #FeesMustFall movement in Malawi. Rasoloniaina and Rakotomalala (2017) investigate the restitution of oral heritage in Madagascar, which reveals influences by the socio-political context and available recording technologies. This political dimension almost inevitably also draws on thinking from media studies, e.g., explored by Zhou et al. (2017) in their inquiry about mediated communication on environmental sustainability in Zimbabwe. Popular culture is most often also a political endeavor, as made evident by Randriamarotsimba (2012) in his study of English influence in Malagasy rap music.
Future fields of relevance Migration and health are two of the most pressing social issues in the 21st century, and yet still understudied in (socio)linguistics. A growing branch of sociolinguistics in southern Africa is linguistic diaspora studies. Several studies challenge conventional neo-colonial research approaches to migration 405
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studies e.g., Mokuoane and Moeketsi (2018) for Lesotho communities abroad, Makoni (2011a) and Ndhlovu (2014; 2018) for the Zimbabwean diaspora, Radke (2021) for Namibians in Germany, Creese (2017) for the Zambian diaspora, Guccini and Zhang (2021) for Chinese communities in Madagascar, or Umunnakwe (2015) for the Nigerian diaspora in Botswana. The other sub-branch that serves closer attention due to its prominent social relevance in southern Africa is health communication. Sociolinguistic accounts of multi-register doctor-patient communication are, for instance, put forth on Lesotho (Thuube, 2015), Malawi (Chimbwete-Phiri, 2018; Chimbwete-Phiri & Schnurr, 2020; Kajombo, 2021), Namibia (Singo, 2014), or Zambia (Chibamba, 2018). The high HIV rates in southern Africa warrant dedicated attention to that context by sociolinguists (e.g., Sobane, 2013, 2015 for Lesotho; Zhou et al., 2016 for Zimbabwe, Mlambo, 2017 for Namibia). Malagasy health communication is often studied from a medical (Fernald et al., 2011), or sociological (Bragazzi & Mahroum, 2019) perspective, which could benefit from interventions by sociolinguists.
Conclusion As we have shown here, Djité’s (2021) assumption about the scarcity of sociolinguistic research in southern Africa is only half the picture when taking the wealth of interdisciplinary and applied approaches into consideration. Overall, research in the region covers a wide range of angles with mostly high and sustainable social relevance and is often independent from political preferences of the respective governments.
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35 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN SOUTH AFRICA Rajend Mesthrie and Yolandi Ribbens-Klein
Introduction This overview takes a broad view of sociolinguistics as a discipline to include variation theory, dialectology, language contact, sociology of language, sociocultural linguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics. Increasingly, South African studies focus on more than one language in a highly multilingual country that has eleven official languages (soon to be twelve), and many more in actual use or as part of the heritage of different communities. Yet, for convenience and specialist purposes, there are also many studies having a monolingual dimension. Equally, scholarship often falls into different language groupings, often having their own salient sociolinguistic and linguistic concerns: Khoe-San (made up in fact of three unrelated sub-groupings or families), Bantu, Afrikaans, English, South African Sign Language, and languages other than the country’s official languages. To fix other parameters: this survey deals with South Africa rather than Southern Africa (despite expected overlaps), and with the decade mainly between 2010 and 2020 (though important contributions at either edge are also referenced). Two complementary surveys must be mentioned at the outset: (a) Mesthrie (2010a), which is the equivalent survey in the first edition of this work covering 1997 to 2007, providing further background information, and (b) A Bibliography of South African Languages 2008–2017, edited by Aarssen et al. (2018), which is a comprehensive work published by the Permanent International Committee of Linguists, coinciding with the quinquennial International Congress of Linguistics held in Cape Town in 2018.
Sociolinguistic variation Sociolinguistic studies of English in South Africa have been strengthened by an acoustic turn that has enabled comparisons within, as well as across social dialects. Post-apartheid society of 1994 onwards had brought about rapid social and linguistic changes, especially among a new Black middle class, responding to new commercial and educational opportunities. The lifting of restrictions upon residency, travel and work opportunities has resulted in new social networks, no longer bounded by the solid barriers of apartheid. A new generation of scholarship responded to these changes in the period from 2008 onwards. The main thrust of this research was to investigate whether the new elites of different backgrounds (Black, Colored, Indian, and White) were 411
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evolving a new sociolect, or whether they were largely adopting the statusful variety spoken by White people in their peer groups. A significant factor in this process is that many of the new elites have been to private schools, where White youth have been in the majority. An important baseline establishing the acoustic norms of the White reference group of students was provided by Bekker (2009), whose thesis provided a detailed acoustic analysis of the vowels of the “White” variety. Bekker’s interest was synchronic as well as historical in relation to theories of vowel shifting in the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK). He provides evidence of the reversal among younger speakers of the erstwhile short front vowel raising, made famous by Lass and Wright (1986). Bekker also provides evidence for the arresting of the diphthong shift of mouth and price. In tying these and other developments together, Bekker provides a revised historical model for the growth of L1 English in South Africa, describing it as a three-stage koineization model, in which the role of Johannesburg’s early mining society is given a much stronger role than in previous conceptualizations. One aspect of Bekker’s work was taken further by Chevalier (2016, 2020), who focused on the reverse front vowel shift and its likely causes. She demonstrated the lowering of kit, dress, and trap among younger Capetonians, plus the retraction of trap. In considering whether this was an internal change or connected to similar changes in south-east England, Australia, and the Canadian Shift (also known as the California Shift or low-back merger shift), Chevalier suggests that influences from USA English, ultimately via Californian film and media, win hands down. This is a reflection of the prestige of the variety via global media, which influences even preschool children at play by students observed by Chevalier. Mesthrie led a research program focusing on the extent to which after an era of enforced separations, young South Africans of different backgrounds may be said to be showing convergences in their English. He finds that convergence toward what used to be the “White” prestige norm is notable among young people who had attended elite private schools. It appears that the students interviewed show “crossovers” into the White variety rather than “crossing” in the established sense. In Rampton’s (1995) sense, crossing often involves an experimental and playful use of varieties that one does not identify as one’s own. The new elites, however, are habitual users of the variety formerly associated with White speakers. In this process, Mesthrie claims that a “deracialization” of middle-class English is taking place. Via close analysis of large numbers of speakers, many further nuances are demonstrated. For instance, monitoring goose fronting shows that Black speakers are closest to the fronted (or centralized) target previously associated with White speakers, compared to young people of Indian and Colored backgrounds (Mesthrie, 2010b). This finding is strengthened by the work of Toefy (2014), the first sociolinguist to work on forced alignment and automatic vowel extraction for South African English, and Wilmot (2011, 2014). Close work with young people confirms the class basis to the relative convergence of sociolinguistic norms, with young people of working-class background less affected by these norms. However, even for the middle-class interviewees, older senses of ethnicity are not being entirely jettisoned: as one young woman stated, “It’s cool to be Colored . . . and to be proud of it” (Toefy, 2014, p. 227). Mesthrie (2017a) shows by a detailed acoustic examination of schwa that gender is a salient factor that mitigates the effects of new class formation among young Black males. In particular, for males falling into the middle class (or emerging middle class for their age bracket), deployment of schwa shows some similarities with their female counterparts. However, they also have some strategic similarities with traditional Black South African usage (in which schwa often turns up as a full vowel). With three broad environments (initial, medial, final) and a range of phonetic contexts, subtleties less obvious in a purely aural analysis are confirmed by close attention to the acoustics. 412
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Less attention has been paid to the sociophonetics of the more traditional varieties of English, which had been more closely studied in the previous decade (see detailed references in the first edition of this handbook, i.e. Mesthrie, 2010a). Mesthrie (2012, 2014) has since demonstrated how even the older forms of Black, Indian, and Colored English interact with each other on a regional basis. This holds particularly for the variables (t) and (d) which show the salience of region over ethnicity for the Colored and Indian communities (Mesthrie, 2012). However, realizations of the bath vowel (or /ɑ:/) do show significant differentiation between the two communities in two cities (Durban and Port Elizabeth), especially so for females – see Mesthrie et al. (2015). In acknowledgment of the robustness of the preceding findings, Du Plessis et al. (2020) bring the topic of regionality in (White) South African English (SAE) back to the table “nearly half a century after regionality in SAE was pronounced no longer existent” (2020, p. 75). A parallel strand of research on SAE, led by Van Rooy, focuses on semantics and grammatical items drawing on the South African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-SA; Jeffery, 2003), with a strong diachronic focus. Much of this research investigates and confirms the early and continuing influence of Afrikaans on SAE. Van Rooy and Wasserman (2014) report on the modals of obligation and necessity in this regard, viz. must and should, which show the influence of Afrikaans moet “must” in varieties of Black and White SAE. Rossouw and Van Rooy (2012) examine a larger set of modals including shall and would diachronically. Makalela (2013) reports on a selection of grammatical and lexical items prominent in BSAE, as used on the radio – notably maybe as a marker of conditional modality and variants of that complementizers. Research on BSAE emphasizes its existence in a multilingual milieu in which code-switching/ translanguaging is a reality and a resource, both linguistically and in terms of identity. Makalela (2013), cited earlier, shows the incorporation of complementizer gore from Sepedi as a variant of English that, no doubt for strategic marking of a multilingual identity, even when English is dominant in in-group conversations. Makalela (2015) discusses more robust cases of translanguaging. Coetzee-Van Rooy (2012, 2014a, 2016) focuses on the positive appraisal of multilingualism among Black students at North-West University and elsewhere. While many studies on varieties of SAE work within the assumptions of the World Englishes paradigm, the very multilingual nature of the populace and the changed power dimensions have led scholars to question the applicability of Schneider’s Dynamic Model from different perspectives (Van Rooy, 2014; Coetzee-Van Rooy, 2014b; Bekker, 2020; Mesthrie, 2021). One factor cited is the competition to English via the co-official position of Afrikaans in the previous political dispensation; and of eleven other languages now: South African Sign Language, isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele, siSwati, Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi, Xitsonga, Tshivenda (plus Afrikaans). Another factor has been the changing nature of political power in which decolonization has been a rallying call among intellectuals and students. Mesthrie (2021) shows how prestige, power and prescriptivism are arranged very differently in post-apartheid South Africa. The star of L2 BSAE has not waned: it is in fact the variety of English most commonly heard in parliament, on the official television and radio channels, and in advertising (Makalela, 2013; Hibbert, 2016). At the same time, more elite varieties of English have not decreased, thanks to the crossovers described earlier. Research on other varieties of English includes an account of narrative structure in South African Indian English (SAIE; Mesthrie, 2013). While narratives of personal experience largely follow the well-known pattern of Abstract, Orientation, Complicating Action, Evaluation, Resolution, and Coda (Labov & Waletzky, 1967), some new elements also occur in traditional SAIE drawn from the Indian substrate conventions. One is the prominent use of athematic material to emphasize the presence of the narrator as a participant or eyewitness. Secondly, there is the use of 413
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rhetorical questions to keep track of characters and build suspense. Thirdly, be + -ing is used as a way of building up the narrative, instead of the conversational historical present. Mesthrie’s (2010a, p. 189) comment regarding the diminishing number of studies on variation in Afrikaans during the latter decades of the twentieth century up to the late 2000s, still rings true for the twenty-first century. The breadth and richness of Afrikaans varieties are under-described from the perspective of regions and social variation in general. One such variety attracting great attention currently (Kaaps) is discussed further later in the chapter. Conradie and Coetzee (2013, p. 898–901) discuss Afrikaans variationist studies conducted during the late twentieth century, while Ribbens-Klein (forthcoming) provides an overview of Afrikaans sociolinguistics research during the twenty-first century. Some notable Afrikaans variationist studies were conducted in the twentyfirst century. Examples of studies focusing on phonetic variation and change in Afrikaans vowels are as follows: /a/-rounding and backing as influenced by regions, age, ethnicity, and gender (Wissing, 2010, 2013); socially structured variation in anticipatory nasal coarticulation according to production and perception data (Coetzee et al., 2019); apparent-time changes in vowel derounding (Wissing, 2011); and allophonic lowering of the front mid vowel /ɛ/ to [æ] (Wissing, 2019). In terms of Afrikaans consonants, the following research was done: Wissing et al. (2015) investigate variation in /s/ based on the observation that younger White speakers palatalize the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ to voiceless palatal fricative [ʃ] in environments where regressive coarticulation is not expected; Bekker and Levon (2017) explore the social meanings of /s/-fronting in SAE and Afrikaans, especially given the close language contact situation between speakers of the two languages; Ribbens-Klein (2017) investigates rhotic variation in Afrikaans in the George region of South Africa’s Garden Route (Western Cape Province), where uvular /r/ realizations index locality and belonging; and variation and change in the realization of plosives are investigated by Coetzee et al. (2018) in the light of tonogenesis. Morpho-syntactic variation in Afrikaans is often discussed from the premise that language contact with English has influenced Afrikaans grammatical structures. Van Rooy and Kruger (2016) show that frequent complementizer omission has its origins in English influence, although the modern-day distribution in spoken Afrikaans now goes beyond what is possible in SAE. Kirsten (2018) explores variation and change of the future auxiliaries (viz. gaan “go” and sal “shall/will”), and argues that gaan is still undergoing the process of grammaticalization, increasing in frequency and contexts of use. Post-apartheid topics pertaining to South African Sign Language (SASL) were concerned with socio-political aspects, and strongly focused on language rights, language policies, and language planning (e.g. see Penn, 1992; Reagan et al., 2006; also see later in the chapter). As previously discussed in detail by Aarons and Akach (2002), historical and socio-political factors contributed to linguistic diversity in the dialects or varieties of SASL. During the apartheid era, the lack of contact between schools for the deaf contributed to sign language diversity, especially at the lexical level. Compounding the issue was the policy of racial segregation that prevented social contact between Deaf people from different ethnic and racial groups, resulting in not only ethnic/racial differences in the SASL lexicon, but also regional differences (Aarons & Akach, 2002). Given this socio-political history, current contentious issues regarding SASL include whether it constitutes a single sign language, or whether it is rather a collection of closely related sign languages. As argued by Reagan (2020), although different dialects or varieties of SASL are in use, the strong consensus in contemporary South Africa is that SASL can be regarded as a single language. While varieties of SASL show a high degree of lexical variation, they all share an underlying morphosyntactic structure. Aspects of lexical variation have been investigated in the last decade by Nokwazi (2017) and Van Niekerk (2020). Nokwazi (2017) compared the SASL lexicon to the lexicons 414
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of other international sign languages to explore whether lexical variation among four SASL participants from different schools relates to different patterns of lexical borrowing. Van Niekerk’s (2020) study also aimed to determine the role played by lexical borrowing in SASL by comparing signs used at different schools for the deaf in different provinces of South Africa. Akach explored the attitudes of parents (2010) and the attitudes of teachers (2014) toward the use of SASL as a medium of instruction. Based on research conducted at two schools in the Free State Province, Akach found that although parents of deaf children presented with a range of attitudes regarding SASL, they predominantly agreed that SASL should be used as medium of instruction. Regarding teachers’ attitudes, Akach (2014) argues that there is an urgent need for structured SASL courses to assist teachers, since while the teachers claimed to have satisfactory skills in using SASL as a medium of instruction, the deaf learners’ school performance indicated a deficit in the level of education provided to them.
African languages, multilingualism, and language contact A major theme within the study of African languages has been the phenomenon of “youth languages”, essentially the existence of “named”, slang-infused but performative, street-aligned registers of male youth. Older research had tended to reify these as autonomous languages, separate from each other and rapidly multiplying in the cities. An influential study by Mesthrie (2008) dissected the numerous claims about these “tsotsitaals”, concluding that they were in all likelihood manifestations of one underlying phenomenon, irrespective of their competing names, such as Iscamtho, Flaaitaal, Ringas, Wheaties, Lingo, etc. These varieties are best studied not as autonomous languages, but as part of a speaker’s repertoire. Mesthrie’s claim is that these tsotsitaals are largely distinguishable by their vocabulary, which invests heavily in innovation and disguise (e.g. in deliberate semantic shifts, back formations and phonological reversals). In contrast, the syntax is essentially the most informal syntax used by the speaker in their mainstream language repertoire (e.g. in urban forms of isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, etc.). This paper rekindled an interest in these youth languages. Brookes’ (2014, 2020) important contribution was the demonstration of the “performed” nature of tsotsitaals, and the existence of core group usage as different from that of early and late adopters, who form subcultures of their own. Though females are largely excluded from the core groups of users, adoption by groups of females espousing lesbian lifestyles and identities is not discounted (Maribe & Brookes, 2014). Hurst-Harosh (e.g. Hurst, 2009) focused on the element of “styling” as an essential part of tsotsitaals. She has also monitored changes of fashion in the adoption of new and old lexis in different centers and the prominence of metaphor in the vocabulary (Hurst, 2016). Following a similar thread, Ditsele (e.g., 2014) has undertaken work on the variety known as Sepitori (previously Pretoria Sotho), aiming to assess its status as an urban vernacular apart from its tsotsitaal styling. The study of urban African languages beyond the performative, male-oriented tsotsitaal styles is a desideratum, as pointed out by Mesthrie and Hurst (2013). Important work on isiZulu in Soweto was undertaken by Gunnink (2014), showing the differences amidst overlaps between this vernacular and Sowetan Tsotsitaal. She concludes that Sowetan Tsotsitaal uses the phonology of Sowetan isiZulu, and is mostly identical in matters of grammar. Simango (2011) gives an important analysis of code-switching practices in the urban varieties of Eastern Cape isiXhosa, showing that the tenets of Myers-Scotton’s 4M model are largely applicable. Simango draws attention to some ongoing convergences between isiXhosa and English, notably in the occasional use of prepositional for in place of the isiXhosa applicative verb suffix -ela, which signals roles like benefactive, etc. 415
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Further understandings of modern urban isiXhosa are provided in the work of Dowling, who has provided engaging accounts of variation and change on radio and in advertising (e.g. Dowling, 2021). Here too variation of a multilingual nature is evident as announcers and scriptwriters play on the fluent and fluid bilingualism evinced in their isiXhosa and English repertoires. Ngcobo (2013) studies the influence of English on isiZulu vocabulary and choice of noun class markers for these loanwords. He shows how a contested ideology of correctness can arise in such choices, as when speakers disagree on whether the appropriate prefix for a borrowed noun like “cellphone” is isi- (as in is-eluphon) or i- (as in i-selufon). While traditionally the borrowing language is held to have the “right” to re-segment borrowed words to suit their own structure, the ideology among the more educated young speakers is to accord this right to the structure of the more powerful and prestigious donor language (i.e. English). Dowling and Krause (2019) describe the use of uncontested translingual morphology in a multilingual classroom context where English is the targeted medium and isiXhosa is the children’s main language. IsiXhosa in Cape Town as a product of internal migration from the Eastern Cape is treated by Deumert (2013) from a sociolinguistic and ethnographic perspective. She focuses on the social and local identities projected by the urban variety of isiXhosa, as it draws increasingly on language contact phenomena from English (such as logical and discourse connectors) and the male youth register of Tsotsitaal. A sociohistorical account of areal linguistics in South Africa is given in Mesthrie (2017b). Some of this work is more historical in nature, as pertaining to the influence of Khoe-San languages over isiXhosa and isiZulu. More modern facets of contact are also involved, as in the areal spread of syntactic features like reduplication and semi-auxiliary “busy”. Mesthrie further argues for the foundational role of Afrikaans in absorbing features from a variety of languages, and then acting as a clearinghouse in disseminating them further. Where Khoe-San is concerned, important work of a sociohistorical nature on the understudied and endangered Khoe language, Xri, was undertaken by Mossmer (2019). In the period under review, much attention has been paid to the variety of Afrikaans now known as Kaaps (or Afrikaaps/Kaaps Afrikaans). Spoken largely, but not exclusively, by people in greater Cape Town of working-class Colored background, this variety draws extensively on Afrikaans and English, and may well qualify in traditional terms as a (historically) mixed code. A special issue of the journal Multilingual Margins in 2016 (volume 3, number 2) is devoted to the historical and current status of Kaaps. Williams, in particular, has traced the identity politics and notions of linguistic citizenship associated with Kaaps and its multilingual speakers, casting light on the role Capetonian hip hop culture plays as a performative genre where marginalized people create and innovate multilingual, “extremely local” spaces to enact their voices. In his book, Remix Multilingualism: Hip Hop, Ethnography and Performing Marginalized Voices, Williams (2017) uses the concept of “remixing” (adopted from music production) to describe the sociolinguistic practice of rappers engaging “in the linguistic act of using, combining and manipulating multilingual forms and functions tied to histories, cultural acts and identities to create new ways of doing multilingualisms” (Williams, 2017, p. 1). According to Williams, these new types of multilingualisms “encompass levels of hybridity that far exceed our modernist structural-functional frames of reference” (Williams, 2017, p. 191; also see Haupt et al., 2018). A related strand of work on reclaiming and recasting multilingual urban spaces comes from scholars researching linguistic (or semiotic) landscapes. Peck et al. (2018) edited a collection of studies on space and multilingualism, arguing that both these aspects are interconnected, and furthermore, are not linear or static, but multi-scalar and mobile, and not necessarily material, but 416
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also conceptual or imagined. Several chapters in the volume focus on South African linguistic landscapes, and deal with the impact of colonialism and apartheid on people’s senses of space/ place, bodies, and belonging. Thematically, the book is divided into three parts. Firstly, it considers the continuation of the past into the present (incorporating conceptual or metaphorical landscapes in essays by Bock and Stroud, and also Baro). Secondly, it focuses on developing and negotiating senses of self through linguistic landscapes (and extending the visibility of language to the body via tattoos, i.e. skinscapes in the essay by Peck and Williams). Thirdly, the focus falls on studies that look at how linguistic landscapes can be used for the reclamation of imagined (and more ethical) futures (e.g. the essay by Mpendukana and Stroud). Approaching linguistics landscapes from a more practical level, Dowling (2010, 2012) has provided critiques of translations of signage from English into isiXhosa in Cape Town, again raising issues of access and power. Du Plessis (e.g., 2011, 2012) addresses issues of power and contestation in changes in place names and signage in different South African locations. Original work on two of Cape Town’s Indian languages has yielded interesting insights into language maintenance and shift in the context of transnationalism. Kokni (aka Konkani) and Gujarati have survived in the city for over 140 years, partly aided by the possibility of circular and chain migration patterns. Mesthrie et al. (2017) show the survival of aspects of village culture from India’s Konkan coast in Cape Town communities, as well as aspects of village-based dialects still present today. Whereas the ancestral village still is a meaningful unit to Kokni descendants in Cape Town, for people of Gujarati origin the district of origin proves a more salient marker. Mesthrie and Chavda (2020) demonstrate the robust survival of Surti dialect features (of the Surat district and environs) in Cape Town. Mobility research has been prominent in the period of review, given the increase in migrants from other parts of Africa since South Africa’s transition to democracy in the 1990s. Dyers (2018) covers the theme of multilingualism as a social practice, showing how intense mobility combined with modern technologies reshape communication in a South African township. Dyers (2009) focuses on language attitudes and innovations in a new Cape Town township, stressing the effect of translocation on isiXhosa-speaking migrants from the Eastern Cape. Furthermore, Dyers and Wankah (2012) examine similar themes involving migrants from other countries in Africa, specifically focusing on intercultural communication at a market for informal traders in the center of Cape Town. Language and politics is expectably a major theme in South African scholarship. Indeed, much research on language planning and policy has an overtly political dimension, with issues of redress at their heart. Although the first democratic government of 1994 opted for a policy of eleven official languages, there is a feeling of unfinished business about the policy. For one thing, five years after the Constitutional Review Committee of the South African Parliament recommended to parliament that South African Sign Language (SASL) be added to the Constitution as the country’s twelfth official language (see Reagan, 2020), the recommended change to the Constitution was only finally approved by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Cabinet in May 2022.1 The recognition of SASL as the twelfth official language in the country will open doors to wider use, including schools beyond those of the Deaf communities. Secondly, the African languages are still felt to be undervalued in the educational system as a whole. The most important work in the period under review is the collection edited by B. Busch, L. Busch and Press (2014) Interviews with Neville Alexander, subtitled The Power of Languages against the Language of Power. The first part of the book was originally published in German prior to Alexander’s death in 2011, while the second part was compiled afterwards. The book is a powerful mix of biography, speeches, keynote addresses, interviews, and important previously 417
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published papers. The last four essays particularly give a link between the historico-political and sociological-cum-educational strands that are highlighted in the last four essays: “Majority and minority languages in South Africa”, “The African Renaissance and the use of African languages in tertiary education”, “Street and standard: Managing language in contemporary South Africa”, and “The potential role of translation as a social practice for the intellectualisation of African languages”. The complexity of South Africa’s politics can be seen when Alexander credits “the white Afrikaans speakers’ passion about Afrikaans” as (ironically) the force that “created the political space within which multilingualism could thrive in the new South Africa” (2014, p. 138). Hibbert’s (2016) book, which is dedicated to Alexander, takes up some of these themes from a more sociolinguistic viewpoint. Despite its title – The Linguistic Landscape of Post-Apartheid South Africa – the focus is on language practices, politics, and discourse in an increasingly global and unequal era (and thus not the politics of signage per se). Hibbert argues that “the hard-earned democratic constitution [of 1994] is currently under threat by counter-democratic discursive trends, which signal a clear departure from democratic governance” (Hibbert, 2016: p. ix). Instead, she finds counter-discursive trends via translanguaging and polyphony in the language practices of the youth, which she speaks of as a movement toward a new discursive order. Engaged scholarship taking up a strong advocacy policy for African languages can be found in the work of Kaschula. His work is interdisciplinary, and particularly valuable to literary scholars trying to re-establish a South African literary canon and critical culture beyond English and Afrikaans. He has also drawn attention to linguistic problems facing the legal profession (e.g. Docrat & Kaschula, 2015) and the continued underplaying of African languages in higher education. As Kaschula records, there is now no shortage of government support in the form of White and Green Papers intended to foster multilingualism. Furthermore, languages like isiXhosa are now official languages. What one misses in these largely advocative accounts is an analysis of why parents and teachers who speak an African language prefer a multilingual approach in which English is given prominence. A more varied collection of essays on language practice in light of these concerns can be found in Kaschula et al. (2017). The effects of the new social media and globalization have also drawn interest as to be expected. Deumert’s book Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication (2104) offers new insights into the relevance of language theorists like Jakobson, Bakhtin, and Derrida in characterizing the heteroglossic and polyphonic worlds of electronic communication. While fulfilling the role of an international introductory textbook, the work is notable for its examples of South African multilingualism and the international platform accorded to isiXhosa.
Conclusion The period of study shows a wealth of South African research on several sociolinguistic topics pertaining to individual languages, as well as language use in multilingual contexts. That said, there is still room for closer sociolinguistic work on the Khoe-San languages, South African Sign Language, as well Xitsonga and Tshivenda. In addition to the variety of languages, there is a diversity of language practices that continue to draw the attention of sociolinguists. These are of immense interest as linguistic and sociolinguistic phenomena. At the same time, there are important implications for language policy, education, heritage, and nation building.
Note 1 The Deaf Federation of South Africa (Deaf SA, 2007) has been campaigning for the constitutional recognition of SASL since 2007.
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36 SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH INTO INDIAN OCEAN LANGUAGES Rada Tirvassen
Introduction This chapter is devoted to the communities of the Southwest Indian Ocean islands, namely the Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion and the Seychelles. It provides a survey of recent and current research trends in sociolinguistics in this part of the world. While I place emphasis on contemporary scholarship, I have extended my overview to offer a brief account of what took place during the last three decades of the twentieth century as this chapter was not included in the previous edition of the Handbook. Beyond these objectives, the broader aim of this chapter is, first, to show that research in sociolinguistics can play a role in the recognition and promotion of languages prior to their formal use in institutions. Second, it demonstrates how academic scholarly work on languages and society in one rather ‘remote’ part of the world – to use a very debatable Eurocentric term – can contribute to theorisation in the discipline.
The Creole languages and creolisation Sociolinguistic research started with the groundbreaking investigation that R. Chaudenson carried out on the Creole language of Réunion island in the early 1970s and which led to the publication of Le Lexique du parler créole de la Réunion (1974). This research served as a stepping stone to explain the genesis of the Creole languages spoken in Indian Ocean Island communities. Chaudenson’s hypothesis is that Réunion Island Creole is the proto-language and the common ancestor of all the other Indian Ocean Creoles (used in Mauritius, Rodrigues and the Seychelles), a statement which he later refines (Chaudenson, 2003). This hypothesis has been fiercely contested by P. Baker (1976) who also carries out systematic archival documentation work. Baker claims that Mauritian Creole is not an offshoot of Réunion Island Creole. Rather, there existed a pidgin which emerged out of contacts between the French population and African slaves and which developed into a Creole language when it was adopted by the children of the slaves brought to Mauritius. The debates and controversies arising from the work of not only these two scholars but also many others, have triggered a broader interest in creolisation as a process, leading to studies that have contributed to an understanding of the genesis and sociolinguistic characteristics of Creole languages. Evidence of this interest and the way the Indian Ocean islands feed into theorisation on these topics can be found in the work of Véronique (2000) and Mufwene (2009). The issues that these two scholars 423
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raise, based on evidence obtained in the Indian Ocean islands, concern the following aspects: (a) the role of settings and the broader anthropological cadre in which Creoles developed; (b) the relative importance of the type of economic activities when compared with the population structure and the social architecture of the communities involved; (c) the impact of these social realities on the nature of language contacts; and (d) the significance of grammatical divergence compared to the lexical and phonetic similarities when determining a family tree of languages.
World Frenches The second major contribution of Chaudenson concerns the significance of World Frenches – often termed ‘marginal French’ or ‘peripheral French’ – for research in sociolinguistics. Chaudenson’s (1989) interpretation of the relationship between non-standard varieties of French and Creole languages in the Indian Ocean islands leads him to establish connections with the varieties of North American French which, he believes, had not been subjected to normative pressure and, as such, could provide clues concerning the material from which Creoles developed. He compares these varieties of French with, on the one hand, French Creoles and, on the other, the strategies of second language acquisition. These comparisons form the backbone of this French linguist’s hypothesis concerning language variability in contact-induced situations (Chaudenson et al., 1993). According to Chaudenson, these varieties of French offer an accurate insight into the ‘self-regulating’ processes of the grammar of the language: should that grammar undergo significant transformation, the language loses its identity and leaves room for the emergence of a Creole. For a critical examination of Chaudenson’s scholarship, the reader is referred to the publication of I. NeumannHolzschuh (2008). Of greater relevance to this chapter is Chaudenson’s (1993) adherence to questioning the hegemony of the so-called Standard French, and his contribution regarding the principle of providing adequate legitimacy to nativised varieties of French that came to be used outside France, following the spread of the language due to colonisation. While Chaudenson is one of the linguists who popularised these ideas in the Indian Ocean, he is not personally involved in the actual descriptive work undertaken on regional Frenches. A number of lexical inventories on regional French varieties have been compiled: M. Carayol (1985) in respect of Réunion; D. de Robillard (1993) in respect of Mauritius; M. Beniamino (1996) in respect of Réunion; and C. Bavoux (2000) in respect of Madagascar. To these studies, one can add Bavoux’s thesis (1994) that focuses on examining Malagasy French from a sociolinguistic perspective and describing its patterns of development, taking into account the remote normative pressure that it has been facing since the breakdown of cultural ties between Madagascar and France, in the wake of the policy to replace French with the Malagasy language.
Focus on the bilingualism/multilingualism of these islands While interest in creolisation stimulated research in the field of sociolinguistics, sociolinguists’ central concern has always been and still is the need for clarity on the bilingual/multilingual nature of these communities, as well as the need for a particular focus on educational policy and reforms. The University of Réunion Island and its two leading scholars, R. Chaudenson and M. Carayol (1978), spearhead these studies on Réunion island. P. Baker (1972), P. Stein (1982), V. Hookoomsing (1987), D. Baggioni & D. de Robillard (1990, 1991) and A. Carpooran (2003) undertook research on Mauritius. A. Bollée (1993) and I. M. Laversuch (2008) carried out research on the Seychelles, and M. Rambelo (1985) conducted a study on Madagascar. The Comoros did not 424
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attract the attention of researchers until the 1990s with A. Ibrahim’s (1996) master’s dissertation on the French language used on this island. Drawing from the theoretical principles of Fishman and Ferguson and in particular from the concepts of diglossia, the scholars mentioned earlier lay stress on the complementary functional distribution of languages and the hierarchical relationship between languages (language varieties) based on the functions that they fulfil. Table 36.1 offers a flavour of the main findings of some thirty years of research. The research carried out during these last few decades highlight the following:
Multilingual speech communities From a broad perspective, these islands are depicted as bilingual/multilingual speech communities where one local language is used and understood by the whole population.
Official languages As far as official languages are concerned, three patterns can be observed. While official languages can be the languages used for all official business (French in Réunion, French and Malagasy in Madagascar), the status of official languages can be determined by language loyalty sentiments as in the Comoros, which has three official languages, namely Shikomori, French and Arabic (Arabic being the language of religion). The Seychelles also has three official languages, namely Creole, English and French, and although French is rarely used in official communication, it enjoys official status as it is the language of the French descendants on the island. Finally, Mauritius decided against having an official language so as to avoid social conflict. Table 36.1 The role and functions of languages in the islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean
Comoros
Madagascar
Mauritius
Réunion
Seychelles
Official languages
French Arabic Shikomori Shikomori
Malagasy French
English French
French
Creole English French Creole English French Creole English
National languages Languages of education
Malagasy
French
French Arabic Shikomori French Arabic
Malagasy French
English
French
Malagasy French
French
Creole English French
Languages of the media
French and Shikomori
French and Malagasy
English French Asian languages Arabic Creole Mainly French, also Creole
French
Languages of non-formal communication
Shikomori
Malagasy
Creole English French Creole
Languages taught
© Rada Tirvassen, 2021
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Creole Bhojpuri French
Creole French
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National languages It was believed that in the post-independent era, all the island states would be involved in a process of national integration and nation-building and would therefore choose their local language as the symbol of their national identity. The decisions they have taken regarding the designation of their national languages are highly significant. 1. Madagascar and the Comoros claim that their local language is the symbol of their national identity. However, in the Seychelles, where Creole, French and English are officially the national languages, the choice is not a real one. 2. The Mauritian government has always supported the notion of cultural diversity based on the recognition of ethnic and religious differences. Mauritius is described as the rainbow nation, one characterised by unity in diversity. Therefore, the government has never felt the need for a nation-building exercise, and there is no national language on the island. 3. In Réunion, which is a French overseas territory, French is the national language. Creole, which has the status of a regional language, is the language that expresses the cultural identity of the islanders.
Languages of education 1. The only significant post-independent reforms undertaken with the aim of promoting the national languages as media of instruction during the first years of primary education have been carried out in the Seychelles and Madagascar. While the reform in the Seychelles was fairly successful, that of Madagascar (M. Rambelo, 1991) was poorly planned and implemented. 2. The only decision taken in Mauritius was to accord all Asian languages and Creole the status of optional languages offered in all primary schools. In Réunion also, Creole is being taught as an optional subject. Language policy decisions in Mauritius serve primarily to solve social conflicts. 3. In the Comoros, French is still mainly used for teaching and learning in public schools as Shikomori is insufficiently standardised. Space does not allow me to examine or even mention the various meaningful contributions of researchers on language and education. Readers are referred to a few of the studies inspired by a concern about the issue: M. Auleear-Owadally (2015); R. Chaudenson and P. Vernet (1983); A. Chauvet (2015); C. T. Fleischmann Schwarz and I. M. Nick (2018); P. Lacoste and L. Leignel (2016); M. Lebon-Eyquem (2007); V. Ranaivo (2011); R. Tirvassen (2011) and S. Wharton (2003).
Languages of non-formal communication As far as non-formal communication is concerned, two broad patterns can be observed: 1. As Madagascar, the Comoros and the Seychelles were exploitation colonies where there were no settlers, the languages of the ex-colonial masters never vernacularised, and the local language is used in all contexts. It is worth noting that Malagasy has a deeper indigenous status than the creole varieties of these territories: the first significant waves of migrants arrived on the island around the seventh century. 2. In Mauritius and Réunion, from the mid-twentieth century, there has been a major shift from the use of the ethnic languages, such as Tamil, Telegu, Hakka and Gujarati, to Creole. Currently, there is a minor shift to the use of French by upwardly mobile families. The case of Mauritius 426
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is interesting from a historical sociolinguistic perspective: English was never vernacularised in this exploitation colony. When an important section of the population experienced social mobility in the second half of the twentieth century and looked for a symbol of their social success (in a community where Creole was still stigmatised), it ‘opted’ for French. Those linked with Asian languages still show various forms of loyalty to these languages – see Mesthrie (2007) for a comparable situation in South Africa.
Rethinking macro-categorisations Research carried out with different theoretical tools has shown that there were cracks in the neatly crafted description which has been provided earlier. While a fairly different interpretation of the language and society issue has come to light in the later years of the twentieth century, the canonical representation of the sociolinguistic landscape of the Creole island communities, in particular Réunion and Mauritius, which drew from diglossia, the functional distribution of languages, and their status and prestige, was challenged as early as the late 1970s. This challenge has been initiated by R. Chaudenson and M. Carayol (1978) who have suggested that the situation in Réunion could not be captured within a bi-polar pattern with Creole on the one side and French on the other. These scholars reason that, in terms of the functional distribution of languages, French can be found in a family context where Creole can be excluded. Furthermore, from a structural perspective, Chaudenson and Carayol (1979) raise the point that it is difficult to establish a dichotomy between Creole and French, given the nature of the variation that characterises the two systems. Carayol and Chaudenson, in analysing recordings made during the surveys that led to their publication of Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Réunion in three volumes (Carayol et al., 1985, 1989 and 1995 respectively) and drawing from De Camp and Bickerton’s notion of a Creole continuum, claim that there is an intralinguistic continuum (with potential overlaps between ‘basilectal French’ and ‘acrolectal Creole’) between acrolectal, mesolectal and basilectal varieties of French and Creole. In a context characterised by a strong campaign advocating the need for the promotion of the Creole language in order to provide social legitimacy to its speakers, who are very often defined in terms of their ethnic belonging, the notion of continuum was rejected by many scholars. However, at the same time, sociolinguists felt that it was necessary to show the specific nature of the type of bilingualism that characterises Réunion, an island which became a French province in 1946. J. Simonin (2002) and C. Bavoux (2003) outline some of the major conceptual advancements made in depicting the innovative language situation in Réunion: for example, M. Beniamino and D. Baggioni (1993) refuse to freeze the two languages, French and Creole, in rigid categorisations as French is not experienced as a colonial and/or a foreign language; D. Véronique (2008) challenges the notion of mother tongue or first language as opposed to a second language. These distinctions, he claims, can be neutralised in Réunion Island. While the macro-sociolinguistic approach to understand the complex nature of the language situation of these communities was being challenged, one other major theoretical development in sociolinguistics has had a significant impact on research in this part of the world. This development, which has been fuelled by the input of neighbouring disciplines (e.g. sociology and social psychology) of the social sciences, is concerned with the study of language attitudes and perceptions. In a critical reflection on the contribution of the studies that assist researchers to get an insight into the relationship between language and society in the Southwest Indian Ocean, C. Bavoux (2003) argues that in contexts characterised by language conflicts, the subjective meanings attached to languages by the ordinary citizen are inherent to what they stand for. Studies undertaken on language attitudes and language perceptions have enabled scholars to provide new knowledge about the language situation in Réunion Island (for example C. Bavoux: Ibid.), Mauritius (for example A. Rajah-Carrim, 427
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2007), Madagascar (S. Babault, 2000; D. Tiana, 2021 and V. Randriamarotsimba, 2013). Babault’s (Ibid.) doctoral research on the notions of language perceptions and attitudes aims to highlight the heterogeneous language practices and, in particular, the so-called mixed discourse as well as the meanings that speakers attach to these language practices. Local researchers, sensitive to speakers’ attitudes and responses to sociolinguistic conflicts, desires and frustrations, have underlined the varied and complex attitudes of speakers. One of the key terms which recurs in the work of Tiana is that of linguistic ideology, while Randramarotsimba uses the concept of linguistic doxa, which is defined as the beliefs that speakers have about languages in contact. The turn of the century witnessed a significant shift in the type of scholarship carried out on Mauritius in pursuit of the same kind of research done on Réunion. Similar to research on Réunion which challenged the appropriateness of the notion of foreign for French, research on Mauritius started interrogating some of the major concepts driving scholarship. These included a critique of (a) the static notion of language defined as a system to conceptualise oral interactions, (b) the speech community perceived in relation to political and geographical boundaries, and (c) diglossia interpreted as a canonical representation of the functions and status of languages. The focus has been on a renewed understanding of multilingualism, and light is thrown on the repertoire of speakers and the manner in which they use their repertoire without paying any particular attention to rigid norms of the standard varieties of languages elaborated by linguists (e.g. D. de Robillard, 2005; S. Canagararajah, 2011; A. Blackledge & A. Creese, 2010). Research on Mauritius adopted a similar trend (e.g. D. de Robillard, 2007; R. Tirvassen, 2011, 2014; T. Auckle & L. Barnes, 2011; R. Tirvassen & S. Ramasawmy, 2017). However, this is not the only research approach adopted by sociolinguists studying language in Mauritius. What can be called a more traditional approach to research does continue. A fairly comprehensive overview of the different case studies carried out on the different facets of the multilingual nature of Mauritius is provided in Tirvassen and Ramasawmy (2017). De Robillard’s (2005) strong view, endorsed by Tirvassen (2014), that hybrid practices symbolise the social fabric that Mauritians are contributing to, needs to be discussed here. Multilingual speech communities using their multilingual repertoire for internal communication find themselves in an ambivalent position that is characterised by different types of tensions. In the case of Mauritius, the country is the epicentre of three main types of socio-cultural dynamics: maintaining the so-called standard varieties of international languages in order to seize national and international economic and cultural opportunities necessary for progress; developing indigenous norms and values which depict the emerging local identities; sticking to ancestral cultural practices (see R. Mesthrie (2007) for a reflection on the cultural hybridity of Indians in South Africa). An exploration of this tension can potentially contribute to the theorisation of the complex and contextual relationships between languages and societies in emerging communities. Any attempt to challenge “mainstream scholarly discourse” (T. Reagan & T. Osborn, 2004, p. 237) should capture the different and sometimes contradictory dynamics of a human community.
Future directions Although this part of the world has the potential to contribute to the never-ending debate and controversies around colonisation and languages, little attention has in actual fact been paid to this issue. As mentioned by R. Tirvassen (2020), there is a need to challenge the view that the colonial/ post-colonial binary is still relevant to interpret language-related phenomena. One cannot dispute the fact that there were periods when colonisation dictated the role and functions of languages. This is true when one considers the scope of the French language with regard to the institutional architecture of Mauritius and Réunion during the French colonial era. However, the situation in 428
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the Seychelles was a little different as the island did not develop a real sociolinguistic superstructure during the French colonial period: the archipelago which was uninhabited before the arrival of the French, did not have a critical demographic mass, neither did it have official institutions that played a key role in the lives of the population. In 1788, the island population consisted of only about thirty French ‘inhabitants’, to which one could add around 200 slaves. The case of the Seychelles, shows that the direct correlation that sociolinguists sometimes establish between the political act of colonisation and the hierarchical relationship between languages or language practices deserves to be re-examined. The existence of a hierarchy of languages or language varieties is, in fact, inherent in human communities which undergo a process of bureaucratisation, and it does not need colonisation to develop. However, once established colonial-based bilingualism, or rather colonial diglossia, is hard to shake off and is still in force in many African countries. As soon as this process of bureaucratisation is established, the egalitarian-style relationship (see Mufwene, 2021) between indigenous languages or language varieties in a non-bureaucratised society is replaced by a hierarchical relationship. This was evidenced by the situation in Madagascar. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, King Radama I took the initiative to democratise access to primary education, to set up a military service and to create a central administration. All formal communication took place in the variety of Malagasy (which became the standard variety) associated with the Merina ethnic group to which he and the largest component of the Malagasy elite belonged. The same pre-colonial diglossia existed in the Comoros. Until the arrival of the French, Swahili and, to a lesser extent, Arabic were used for prestigious communication, especially in official institutions, whereas Shikomori was the language of non-formal communication. Classical Arabic was mainly the language of religion and the medium in which children acquired their writing skills (because Islamic instruction was offered only in madrasas). From a broader perspective, these elements show that there is scope for historical sociolinguistic research where some of the traditional beliefs and understanding of what took place is questioned. Finally there still remains some unattended ‘basic’ sociolinguistic issues in the area which need extensive investigation. For example, there has been little research on the variation that characterises the Malagasy language. The call of J. Dez (1990) for a better understanding of the nature of the variation of the Malagasy language has not yet met with any positive response. There seems to be a tendency, even among linguists (see Dez: Ibid.), to identify language variation in terms of the ethnic boundaries on the island. The same can be said of research on sociolinguistic variation in the Comoros. Because of the paucity of research in this archipelago, the only available information is that there exists one dialect per island, even though there is now considerable communication between the main island and the smaller ones. It is important to consider that institutions (e.g. schools) and the media can foster complex forms of sociolinguistic variation. Viewed from a broader perspective, it can be said that there has always been some quality research on languages in Madagascar. However, the number of studies on the Comoros remains fairly low, and because this does not constitute a strong database for an adequate standardisation exercise of Shikomori prior to its use in formal contexts, it may be difficult to grant the wish expressed fairly often over the past few years for the use of the language in formal contexts.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Rajend Mesthrie for some insightful comments made on a first version of this chapter. I also wish to thank Martin J. Ball for some helpful documentary materials sent during a period when physical access to libraries was very difficult. 429
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Bibliography Auckle, T., & Barnes, L. (2011). Code switching, language mixing and fused lects: Emerging trends in multilingual Mauritius. Language Matters, 42(1), 104–125. Auleear-Owodally, A. M. (2015). Code-related aspects of emergent literacy: How prepared are preschoolers for the challenges of literacy in an EFL context? Early Child Development and Care, 185(4), 509–527. Babault, S. (2000). Contacts de langues et dynamique socio-langagière à Madagascar: Approche descriptive et interprétative des usages du français chez les lycéens majungais [thèse nouveau régime, Université de Rouen]. Baggioni, D., & Robillard, D. de. (1990). Ile Maurice, une francophonie paradoxale. L’Harmattan. Baggioni, D., & Robillard, D. de. (1993). Le français régional mauricien: Une variété de langue en contact et en évolution dans un milieu à forte mobilité linguistique. In Multilinguisme et développement (pp. 141–237). IECF/Didier Érudition. Baker, P. (1972). Kreol: A description of Mauritian creole. C. Hurst & Co. Baker, P. (1976). Toward a Social History of Mauritian Creole [Dissertation, University of York]. Bavoux, C. (1994). Description du français et de la francophonie à Madagascar [thèse Nouveau Régime, Université d’Aix-en-Provence]. Bavoux, C. (2000). Le français à Madagascar: Contribution à un inventaire des particularités lexicales. AUPELF-UREF/Duculot. Bavoux, C. (2003). Fin de la “vieille diglossie” réunionnaise? Glottopol, 2, 29–39. Beniamino, M. (1996). Le français de la Réunion: Inventaire des particularités lexicales. Edicef/AUPELF. Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (2010). Multilingualism: A critical perspective. Continuum International Publishing Group. Bollée, A. (1993). Le français dans un contexte trilingue: Le cas des Seychelles. In D. de Robillard & M. Beniamino (Eds.), Le Français dans l’Espace Francophone (pp. 119–127). Honoré Champion. Canagarajah, S. (2011). Translanguaging in the classroom: Emerging issues for research and pedagogy. Applied Linguistics Review, 2, 1–28. Carayol, M. (1985). Particularités lexicales du français réunionnais: Propositions pédagogiques. Nathan. Carayol, M., & Chaudenson, R. (1978). Diglossie et continuum linguistique à La Réunion. In N. Gueunier (Ed.), Les français devant la norme (pp. 175–190). Champion. Carayol, M., & Chaudenson, R. (1979). Essai d’analyse implicationnelle d’un continuum linguistique: Français-créole. In P. Wald et G. Manessy (Eds.), Les français devant la norme (pp. 129–175). L’Harmattan. Carayol, M., Chaudenson, R., & Barat, C. (1985). Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de La Reunion. CNRS Editions (tomes I: 1985; II: 1989; III: 1995). Carpooran, A. (2003). Ile Maurice: Des langues et des lois. L’Harmattan. Chaudenson, R. (1974). Le lexique du parler créole de La Réunion (2 Vols.). Champion. Chaudenson, R. (1989). Créoles et enseignement du français: Français, créolisation, créoles et français marginaux. L’Harmattan. Chaudenson, R. (1993). Français et créoles dans les aires créolophones. In D. de Robillard & M. Beniamino (Eds.), Le Français dans l’Espace Francophone (pp. 419–430). Honoré Champion. Chaudenson, R. (2003). La créolisation: Théorie, applications, implications. L’Harmattan. Chaudenson, R., & Vernet, P. (1983). L’école en créole. ACCT. Chaudenson, R., et al. (1993). Vers une approche panlectale de la variation du français. IECF/Didier-Érudition. Chauvet, A. (2015). Statuts des langues et éducation de base aux Comores. Revue internationale d’éducation de Sèvres, 70. Retrieved June 22, 2020, from http://journals.openedition.org/ries/4499 Dez, J. (1990). Cheminements linguistiques malgaches. Peeters/Selaf. Fleischmann Schwarz, C. T., & Nick, I. M. (2018). “Mon respe tou lezot lalang!”: A case study of native teacher attitudes towards Creole-mediated multilingual education in Seychelles. Current Issues in Language Planning, 19(2), 183–197. Hookoomsing, V. (1987). L’emploi de la langue créole dans le contexte multilingue et multiculturel de l’Ile Maurice. Une étude de son importance en tant que langue commune et des implications sociolinguistiques de son élaboration en mauricien [PhD thesis, Université Laval, Québec]. Ibrahim, A. (1996). Le français aux Comores [Mémoire de maîtrise, Université de La Réunion]. Lacoste, P., & Leignel, L. (2016). L’éducation aux Comores: Un modèle français en phase de lente hybridation. Revue Tiers Monde (pp. 226–227). Retrieved September 5, 2021, from www.cairn.info/revue-tiersmonde-2016-3-page-197.htm Laversuch, I. M. (2008). An unequal balance: The Seychelles’ Trilingual language policy. Current Issues in Language Planning, 9(4), 375–394.
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Sociolinguistic research into Indian Ocean languages Lebon-Eyquem, M. (2007). Une approche du développement langagier de l’enfant réunionnais dans la dynamique créole-français [thèse de doctorat, Université de La Réunion]. Mesthrie, R. (2007). Language shift, cultural change and identity retention: Indian South Africans in the 1960s and beyond. South African Historical Journal, 57(1), 134–152. Mufwene, S. (2009). The founder principle in creole genesis. In J. Holm & S. Michaelis (Eds.), Contact languages: Critical concepts in language studies (pp. 367–414). Routledge. Mufwene, S. (2021). Language shift. In J. W. Stanlaw (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of linguistic anthropology (pp. 1–9). John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Neumann-Holzschuh, I. (2008). À la recherche du superstrat”. What North American French can and cannot tell about input in Creolisation. In S. Michaelis (Ed.), Roots of creole structures: Weighing the contribution of substrates and superstrates (pp. 357–384). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Rajah-Carrim, A. (2007). Mauritian Creole and language attitudes in the education system of multiethnic and multilingual Mauritius. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 28(1), 51–71. Rambelo, M. (1985). Analyse macro-sociolinguistique d’une situation de diglossie: Le cas de Madagascar, Centre International de Recherche sur le Bilinguisme, Québec. Rambelo, M. (1991). Langue nationale, français et développement (Éléments pour une politique d’aménagement linguistique à Madagascar). In F. Jouannet et al. (Eds.), Langues, Économie et développement (pp. 5–73). IECF/Didier-Érudition. Ranaivo, V. (2011). Réforme des curricula et langues à Madagascar, l’intégration en question. In P. Martinez, M. Miled, & R. Tirvassen (Eds.), Le français dans le monde, Recherches et applications (Vol. 49, pp. 166–175). Le français dans le monde. Randriamarotsimba, V. (2013). Usages du malgache et représentations sur les langues d’enseignement à Madagascar: Pour quel aménagement en milieu scolaire? In M. Rabenoro (Ed.), Quelle langue utiliser en classe à Madagascar au 21ème siècle? (Casas Book Series No. 99, pp. 66–81). The Center for Advanced Studies of Africa Society. Reagan, T., & Osborn, T. (2004). Reflections on critical language studies and the genesis of a counter paradigm. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 1(4), 237–242. Robillard, D. de. (1991). Développement, langue, identité ethnolinguistique: Le cas de l’île Maurice. In F. Jouannet et al. (Eds.), Langues, Économie et développement (pp. 123–181). IECF/Didier Érudition. Robillard, D. de. (1993). Contribution à un inventaire des particularités lexicales du français de l’Ile Maurice. EDICEF/AUPELF. Robillard, D. de. (2005). Quand les langues font le mur; lorsque les murs font peut-être les langues: Mobilis in mobile, ou la linguistique de Nemo. Revue de l’Université de Moncton, 36(1), 129–156. Robillard D. de. (2007). La linguistique autrement: Altérité, expérienciation, réflexivité, constructivisme, multiversalité: En attendant que le Titanic ne coule pas. Retrieved August 20, 2012, from www.u-picardie.fr/LESCLaP/IMG/pdf/robillard_CAS_no1.pdf Simonin, J. (2002). Parler réunionnais? Hermès, 32–33, 287–296. Stein, P. (1982). Connaissance et emploi des langues à l’Ile Maurice. Helmut Buske Verlag. Tiana, R. D. (2021). Impact de l’idéologie linguistique de conflit et redéfinition de l’autre à Madagascar. In D. Tiana Razafindratsimba, L. Rachédi, F. Perocco, M. Bochra, et M. Vatz Laaroussi (Eds.), Visages du racisme contemporain: Les défis d’une approche interculturelle (pp. 183–198). L’Harmattan. Tirvassen, R. (2011). Curriculum et besoins langagiers en zone d’éducation linguistique plurielle. In Recherches et application (pp. 104–115). Le français dans le monde. Tirvassen, R. (2014). Créolisation, plurilinguismes et dynamiques des langues. L’Harmattan. Tirvassen, R. (2020). Colonial languages: An appropriate lens to drive educational reforms? In L. Gardelle & C. Jacob (Eds.), The Case of the Islands of the Indian Ocean in Schools and National Identities in Frenchspeaking Africa (pp. 180–198). Routledge. Tirvassen, R., & Ramasawmy, S. J. (2017). Deconstructing and reinventing the concept of multilingualism: A case study of the Mauritian sociolinguistic landscape Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus [Online], 41–59. Véronique, D. (2000). Créole, Créoles français et théories de la créolisation. l’Information Grammaticale, 85, 33–38. Véronique, D. (2008). L’école à la Réunion: Enjeux pour le créole et le français. Faire Savoirs, 7, 83–92. Wharton, S. (2003). Formation des enseignants dans les aires créolophones: Comment évaluer la politique linguistique à l’oeuvre ? Selon quels critères? In F. Tupin (Dir.), École et éducation (pp. 231–253). Anthropos.
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PART V
Europe
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-42
37 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE AREA Falco Pfalzgraf
Introduction German is the sole official national language of Germany, Liechtenstein, and Austria, and a co-official language of Luxembourg and Switzerland. It is the sole official regional language of the Germanspeaking community in Belgium, and a co-official regional language in Italy (Alto Adige/Südtirol, South Tyrol). The number of German speakers in these seven countries totals 96 million. German is furthermore a minority language in at least 41 countries1 with an approximate total of 7.5 million speakers (Ammon, 2015, pp. 170, 173, 206–207). This altogether amounts to 103.5 million speakers, not including the 15.4 million people learning German around the world (Ebert, 2021, p. 5). In Germany, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) protects Danish, Frisian (North Frisian and Saterland Frisian), Low German, Sorbian (Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian), and Romanes. But aside from Low German, minority languages spoken in Germany will not be covered here; excellent accounts of these are provided by Beyer and Plewnia (2020). This chapter seeks to summarise the relevant research conducted since 2008 – as well as providing a useful bibliography – for countries where German is the sole official national or a co-official language. Regrettably, restrictions on length make it impossible to adequately acknowledge the work of my esteemed colleagues.
Dialects/Regiolects Half a century ago, German dialectology was one-dimensional and reconstructive. In recent decades, however, the dialectal landscape of German has grown to be better described,2 with dialect geography yielding extensive multi-volume atlases covering a range of regions. All that data is currently being compiled and made available online.3 In dialectology, the focus of research has traditionally been the local base dialect. Nowadays, however, this base dialect has taken on different forms in some areas or become practically undetectable in others. Consequently, German dialectology now focuses on regional, space-related variational issues. For example, Auer (2014) found that many speakers of German use a version of the standard with only subtle traces of a dialectal substrate. As a growing number of German speakers use a variety of standard German, they become increasingly difficult to localise. The question is 435
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whether – and to what extent – the historical boundaries of dialects continue to exist within the modern boundaries of Regionalsprachen/regiolects (cf. Herrgen et al., 2019). This question, among others, is addressed in several major research projects. First, there is the long-term project REDE at the Marburg Research Centre Deutscher Sprachatlas. REDE surveys and comprehensively analyses regional language variation in Germany over a period of 19 years (cf. Ganswindt et al., 2015; Kehrein, 2019). The Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA) focuses on lexis and occasionally covers morphosyntax and phonology, providing maps to show the current diversity of everyday German (cf. Möller & Elspaß, 2015, 2021). The German Research Foundation (DFG) project Sprachvariation in Norddeutschland (SiN) covers Frankfurt/Oder, Kiel, Hamburg, Münster, Bielefeld, and Potsdam and found a decline in Low German alongside increased use of a North German regiolect. Following earlier research into perceptions of norms and standard in Austria and Switzerland by Herrgen (2015) and Peter (2015), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) recently financed a large-scale project called German in Austria: Variation, Contact, Perception (DiÖ) on the variety and change in the German language in Austria over time (cf. Budin et al., 2019). Based on the AdA, Pickl et al. (2019) also researched variation in Austrian German. Hundt et al. (2020) offer a snapshot of current research on regiolects across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland that includes perceptions and attitudes. Perceptual dialectology is strong not only when it comes to German regiolects (cf. Plewnia & Rothe, 2012), but also dialects. Recent research shows that dialect competence in Germany is (still) strongest in the south and continuously decreases northwards – but the various regiolects are the most used/spoken variety overall (Adler & Ribeiro Silveira, 2020, 2021a, 2021b). When it comes to preferences, Germans like Northern German and Bavarian best – and Saxon least. Most spoken is Swabian, Saxon, Bavarian, and Platt/Low German. In terms of Austrian dialects, Kleene (2020) found that Austrians like Tyrolean, Bavarian, and Vorarlbergian the most, and Viennese and Carinthian the least. Studler’s (2019) research on perceptions of and attitudes towards standard German in Switzerland shows that ‘good German’ is (still) perceived as strongly related to Germany and its institutions. Where negative attitudes towards standard German exist, they appear in reproduced, unchallenged stereotypes. Rejection of standard German can appear as a result of fear of loss of dialect and identity; at the same time, it can also be perceived as the language of cultural identification between German-speaking areas. Oberholzer’s (2017) work further shows that the purported perception of standard German as a ‘foreign language’ in Switzerland is actually non-existent.
Low German Low German (LG) was once a language. However, it became increasingly devalued over time and by the mid-twentieth century, it was regarded as a dialect. Its inclusion in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in the 1990s officially gave LG the status of a language again. Nevertheless, around 60% of its speakers – and even some linguists – still regard it as a dialect. Although use of the language declined especially after 1945, its usage became moderately stable in 2007. While it is difficult to establish how many speakers of LG exist today, the generation who speaks the language well is clearly older and uses it only in specific situations (cf. Adler, 2021). Other than that, LG is used either as a sociosymbolic means to express identity (e.g., Jürgens, 2015; Schröder, 2019) or as a way to create a glorified pre-industrial image of a supposedly stressfree past, e.g. in tourism brochures and public spaces (Reershemius, 2011, 2020). Other current research on LG4 aims to establish where, when, and by whom LG is spoken; how and where the language is passed on; and how to encourage its use (e.g., Adler et al., 2018). 436
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Analysing discourses among laypeople, in the press, and in politics, Arendt (2010) concludes that their attitudes have a mostly negative or neutral impact on the use of LG – with a prognosis of potentially positive effects through the teaching of LG in kindergartens, schools, and universities. In 2010, Hamburg was the first federal state to introduce LG as a compulsory elective at primary school. By 2014, Schleswig-Holstein and Bremen had followed in kind. In 2016, LG became a regular subject at Sekundärstufe 1 in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. In 2017, Germany’s Federal Assembly of Ministers of Education (KMK) recognised Low German as oral and written examination subjects in the Abitur, and LG teaching can now be studied at seven north German universities. Among others, Langhanke (2017, 2020) addresses ensuing issues related to standardisation. For an example of additional research related to LG in nurseries, kindergartens, schools, universities, and further education, see Arendt et al. (2017).5
Youth Lists and basic dictionaries of words used by German university students can be traced back to at least the mid-eighteenth century. However, systematic linguistic research was not undertaken until the 1980s.6 Since then, the quantity and quality of research output has increased. In recent years, a series of international conferences was held and the conference proceedings, as well as a wealth of other high-quality publications, show that the field is both active and growing. In the past, homogeneity of ‘the youth’ and their speech was assumed. In reality, heterogeneity has proven to be the typical feature. Nevertheless, studies observing teenage participants still generally lack clear descriptions of the social backgrounds of the subjects. As Neuland (2018, p. 43) points out, theoretical clarification of the status of analysed groups of teenagers remains a desideratum in linguistic research. Dittmar (2018) seconds this when insisting on the need to distinguish between the speech of autochthonous and immigrant teenagers. Some of the most recent research focuses on spoken interaction between teenagers in specific situations, applying methods of pragmatics to uncover patterns of communication. In that regard, Walther’s (2018) call for the acceptance of a new ‘Doing Youth’ concept – based on ‘Doing Gender’ – could facilitate analysis of complex patterns in both the speech and behaviour of teenagers. Current research also analyses how the media constructs an image of youth speech. Mroczynski (2018) debunks a widespread myth that the use of the adjective porno (porn) had replaced the use of geil (horny) by proving that this was not even remotely the case. More traditional Jugendsprache research by Mešić (2018) compares the frequency of foreign words in popular German youth language ‘dictionaries’ and finds that their number has increased, especially in terms of loan words from Turkish and/or Arabic. This, as well as other research that deals with questions of ethnicity, such as Preseau (2018) or Bierbach and Birken-Silverman (2014), leads over to the next section of this article on Kiezdeutsch. Research on youth speech in Austria is also well-established. For instance, Oberdorfer and Weiß (2018) found that youth language in urban areas such as Vienna and Graz, shows hardly any dialectal markers. Dialect levelling and orientation on standard German are on the rise. In her work on syntactical phenomena, Lenzhofer (2018) affirms the need for further studies comparing urban and rural areas in Austria.
Ethnicity In the mid-1990s, German comedy duo Erkan und Stefan poked fun of the variety used by teenagers with foreign backgrounds. Possibly inspired by the title of Zaimoglu’s (1995) book Kanak Sprack, the duo referred to this variety as Kanaksprak. The term was subsequently popularised and 437
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commonly used by the media and on the internet – despite the fact that Kanak Sprak, translated by Wiese (2014, pp. 5, 7) as ‘wog speak’, is more derogatory and xenophobic than Türkendeutsch or Ghettodeutsch. At the beginning of the new millennium, linguistic research into this variety of German began to flourish (Füglein, 2000; Auer, 2003; Wiese, 2006). The new literature replaced older work from the late 1960s on Gastarbeiterdeutsch or ‘guest worker German’, a variety of German that was learned informally at workplaces. Kiezdeutsch or ‘neighbourhood German’ became the established term for a variety used by teenagers in multi-ethnic, urban areas. Most of its speakers have a foreign background that is usually, but not exclusively, Turkish. Older terms were rejected as they were either inaccurate (Türkendeutsch) or regarded as offensive (Kanak Sprak). Speakers of Kiezdeutsch make use of the variety in appropriate situations and are able to switch between Kiezdeutsch and standard German. According to Wiese (2006, 2012) and Keim (2010), some morphosyntactical and phonological features of Kiezdeutsch include: the use of bare noun phrases in ‘local’ expressions where a lexical preposition and article would be expected (e.g., Wir gehen Görlitzer Park); highly productive light verb constructions (e.g., Machst du rote Ampel7); a new focus particle (so); lexical borrowing from Arabic and Turkish (wallah, yallah, Lan); the shortening of vowels and coronalisation of the voiceless palatal fricative [ç] to the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ]; a phonetic reduction from [ts] to [s] in word-initial position. These features have been observed in several urban areas of Germany and research has been conducted in Berlin (Wiese, 2012 etc.), Mannheim (Keim, 2011, 2012), Nürnberg (Behringer, 2019), and Stuttgart (Auer, 2013), among other urban areas. For Austria, Ivušić (2011) researched the multiethnolect of Hallein near Salzburg, while Tissot et al. (2011) focused on ethnolects and Swiss German. The Kiez variety is, of course, not restricted to German-speaking areas; similar varieties have been researched in urban areas in Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden (cf. Wiese, 2009; Keim, 2012; Cheshire et al., 2015; Nortier & Svendsen, 2015). When it comes to the classification of Kiezdeutsch, there is no consensus among linguists.8 Wiese (2012) regards it as a dialect or, more precisely, as a multiethnic dialect (Wiese, 2013) and claims that Kiezdeutsch is not a reduced or ‘wrong’ form of German. Instead, it systematically developed innovations in the areas of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, which is characteristic of a dialect. Auer (2013) defines it as a (poly-)ethnolect because Kiezdeutsch is neither stabile yet, nor consistently spoken by anyone. Auer (2013) also provides a good overview of the current state of research, insisting that there is a need for comprehensive, empirical analyses of the variety. Newly established resources, such as the KiezDeutsch Korpus (KiDKo), might facilitate this.9 Freywald et al. (2011) argue that Kiezdeutsch is a multiethnolect because it is a system of its own, distinguishable from the standard and other varieties, rather than a collection of unsystematic errors. They also note that it is spoken by people from different ethnic backgrounds, including the non-migrant majority ethnic group. Polemic newspaper articles by linguists, such as Glück (2012), do not help with understanding complex phenomena such as Kiezdeutsch. A member of the purist German language protection organisation Verein Deutsche Sprache (VDS), Glück also lashes out against Genderdeutsch.
Gender In the late 1970s, feminist linguistics began to establish itself in Germany. In the early 1980s, critical German linguists such as Pusch (1984) and Trömel-Plötz (1980) began to write about interactions between the use of language on the one hand, and gender, gender roles, and power relations on the other. This work highlighted the lack of distinction between – or even confusion of – gender and sex. The focus fell mainly on lexis and morphology, such as so-called generic masculine forms, 438
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and still explicitly committed to the structuralist approach popular at the time. But over the following decades, researchers began to embrace alternative approaches. Since the 1990s, the focus of critical lenses has shifted to the relationship between the word and the world. Rather than assuming a gender binary, an anti-essentialist concept of gender was developed. Gender is now regarded as a cultural and interactive construct – a result of continuous historical processes and actions as well as an effect of discursive processes. It is therefore ambiguous. As a result, the current German Genderlinguistik researches constructions of all genders rather than just the female. It also considers other variables, such as class, race, age, (dis-)ability, etc. Genderlinguistik is thus deeply rooted in sociolinguistics even as it further develops and extends the discipline. However, Genderlinguistik has yet to be institutionalised in Germany as a chair has still not been established for the discipline.10 Current theoretical trends include the broadening of linguistic discourse analysis to include the concept of dispositifs. This concept enables an understanding of the complex mechanisms of the processes through which certain gender images are constructed, as well as the complex interplay of extremely heterogeneous elements (Spieß, 2012). It can provide information about assumed and unreflected implicitness, such as fixed role models and the extent to which these are anchored and permanently reinforced within our social context. Similarly, the inclusion of post-structuralist theoretical premises would help expose the discursive production of linguistic structures. In turn, this could reveal how grammatical categories (e.g., gender) are also the result of historically situated discursive processes (Motschenbacher, 2017). A growing number of studies contributes to a wide variety of existing Genderlinguistik research output. To highlight but a few, Kotthoff (2012) uses the ‘indexing gender’ approach (cf. Kotthoff & Nübling, 2018) to investigate how female friends make gender relevant in private phone conversations. This process unfolds as the friends create standards of behaviour and moral norms along with (ultimately) an image of themselves by discussing the behaviour of their peers. Nübling (2009) analyses the lexicographic construction of gender in German dictionaries since the 1980s. The surprising, if not shocking, results reveal the existence of a worryingly high number of gender stereotypes. In an empirical study, Schröter et al. (2012) investigate how German and Swiss subjects evaluate and use generic masculine forms. While significant differences exist in terms of age (those under 25 are more prone to reject generic masculine forms), nationality is not very relevant when it comes to the question of how subjects perceive the acceptability of such forms. However, subjects from Germany consider masculine generic forms more customary than those from Switzerland. Elmiger et al. (2017) conducted more research into Swiss German with a focus on possibilities and limits for the implementation of egalitarian language in official texts in the Swiss multilingual environment. Solís (2011) focuses exclusively on German when analysing public discourse on the equal linguistic treatment of women and men in Switzerland. The debate about fair, gender-neutral language had been restricted to mainly feminist and academic circles until its first effects became apparent and the topic surfaced in mass media in the mid-2010s. While earlier pieces in broadsheets such as Die Welt still referred exclusively to developments in the academic world (Ginsburg, 2014), later contributions (Deusche Welle, for example; see Danhong, 2015) showed that the gender debate had finally reached the general public. Linguists such as Eisenberg (2017) and Glück (2018) joined the discussion in Deutschlandfunk and Frankfurter Allgemeine, respectively, while Duden published a guidebook on how to increase gender visibility in German (Diewald & Steinhauer, 2017). In March 2019, the Verein Deutsche Sprache or VDS, a purist association of more than 36,000 self-declared guardians of the German language originally founded in 1997 to combat a perceived overuse of anglicisms in German,11 launched a campaign titled Schluss mit dem Gender-Unfug! or ‘stop the gender nonsense!’ By April 2022, the VDS had collected signatures from almost 90,000 supporters.12 Among these were 439
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celebrities and many other public figures. In response, Nübling (2020a, 2020b) identified and challenged the faulty assumptions and misleading statements of the VDS.13 Yet when it comes to the justification or even implementation of gender neutral language, linguists are not unified in their views. Those who focus primarily on mere structural questions tend to have more traditional, conservative views, while those who draw from neighbouring disciplines are open to, or even advocate for, change. Among the former are the contributors to Baumann and Meinunger (2017), with the exception of Pusch and Stefanowitsch. Finally, academia has always been – and should remain – a place to put forward innovative ideas and suggestions, to provoke thought and debate, and even to initiate change. In terms of Genderlinguistik, Lann Hornscheidt criticises the general concept of gender binary as well as ideas of normality and categorisation in society. Consequently, they propose a gender-neutral ‘x-form’ to replace all gender-specific suffixes, leading to constructions such as einx gutx Lehrx to neutralise ein/e gute/r Lehrer/in (Hornscheidt, 2012). Most recently,14 Hornscheidt proposed replacing all articles, pronouns, and gender-related suffixes with ‘ens’, as in Ens Käufens und ens Einkaufskorb instead of ein/e Käufer/in und sein/ihr Einkaufskorb. Kotthoff (2017, 2020) further provides an overview and discussion of current practices that can facilitate gender-neutral German.
Notes 1 The 41 countries listed in Ammon (2015, p. 207) are Argentina, Australia, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, France (Alsace/Lorraine), Israel, Canada, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Croatia, Colombia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, Namibia, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Tajikistan, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, Uruguay, the United States, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela. For more information on German as a minority language, see: Beyer and Plewnia (2019, 2021), Boas (2009), Eller-Wildfeuer and Wildfeuer (2019), Plewnia and Riehl (2018), Eichinger et al. (2008), and Lenz (2016). 2 ‘Traditional’ dialectology is still strong in Germany, as evidenced in a variety of publications (e.g., Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik – Beihefte). 3 See . 4 A useful overview is provided by the regularly updated online Bibliographie des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung . 5 Note particularly the contributions by Mittelstädt (nurseries), Biedowitcz (kindergartens), Fink (schools), Arendt (university), and Reuter (further education) in Arendt et al. (2017) for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. 6 Neuland (2018, chapter II) provides a thorough historical overview of research into the language of German youth. 7 The warning ‘Machst du rote Ampel’ (literally: ‘Are you doing red traffic light’; note that it is not a question) would normally be ‘Du gehst bei rot über die Ampel’ (‘You are crossing a red traffic light’). 8 The fierce discussion on Kiezdeutsch, both within academia and the general public, is well summarised in Wiese (2015). 9 The KiezDeutsch Korpus (KiDKo) is available online at . 10 A good overview of the history of linguistic research on gender and sex in German is provided by Kotthoff and Nübling (2018), Reisigl and Spieß (2017), and Spieß et al. (2012). A most useful overview of current research trends can be found in Günthner et al. (2012). 11 Linguistic purism in German could not be covered here. Research on influential private associations and independent individuals in Germany, as well as on their discourses, has been conducted mainly by Falco Pfalzgraf, Jürgen Spitzmüller, and Karoline Wirth. Significant contributions were also made by Jan Georg Schneider and André Meinunger. Current research on Austrian linguistic purism has only been published by Falco Pfalzgraf (2016, 2019, 2021, 2022), with hardly any work existing on Swiss linguistic purism. 12 See . 13 Further support from the academic community can be found at . 14 Lann Hornscheidt in tagesthemen, 9 June 2021, see .
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38 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN THE DUTCH LANGUAGE AREA Jeroen Darquennes
Introduction Following up on a similar chapter published more than ten years ago (Darquennes, 2010), the present chapter first and foremost seeks to provide an overview of sociolinguistic research concerning the Dutch language as produced by researchers working in the Dutch language area in Europe. It only marginally addresses sociolinguistic research concerning other parts of the Dutch language area, neglects sociolinguistic research on Dutch produced by researchers who are active outside the Dutch language area and also largely ignores sociolinguistic research of researchers in the Dutch language area on languages other than Dutch. Readers should not only be aware of these omissions, but also of at least one other major additional shortcoming: Due to a lack of recent survey articles, the inventory of sociolinguistic topics in the fifth section is limited to what the author of this article, based on accessible (mainly online) information, managed to collect and identify as the sociolinguistic core business of researchers working at universities or research institutes in Flanders and The Netherlands. The inventory is, therefore, everything but exhaustive. The fourth section provides more details on how the information was collected. The information in this section is meant to give readers access to online portals that will, e.g., allow them to complement the names of the mainly senior researchers mentioned in this chapter with those of the many junior researchers who quantitatively and qualitatively contribute to the field’s further advancement. The brief history of the sociolinguistics of Dutch in the heartland of the Dutch language area as presented in the third section helps to identify some of the strongholds of sociolinguistic research in the Low Countries, i.e. the core of the Dutch language area that is discussed in more detail in the following section.
The Dutch language area Most of the approximately 24 million native speakers of Dutch are found in the Low Countries in Europe, i.e. in The Netherlands as its northern part (with approximately 17 million speakers) and Flanders as its southern part (with approximately 6.5 million speakers). Varieties of Dutch are also used by approximately 90,000 persons in Frans Vlaanderen, i.e. that part of France that borders the West of Flanders. The biggest group of Dutch (L1 or L2) speakers outside of Europe is found in Suriname (approximately 575,000). Dutch is also used in the so-called Caribbean part of 445
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the Kingdom of the Netherlands (see www.taalunie.be for details). With the exception of France, Dutch has official status in all of the aforementioned areas. Given its use (and its official status) in a number of countries, Dutch is considered to be a pluricentric language, i.e. “a language with several interacting centers, each providing a national variety, with at least some of its own norms” (Willemyns, 2013, p. 4). The rich history of Dutch is covered in comprehensive detail e.g. in Willemyns (2013) and Stegeman (2021). Those who would be in search of an all-round overview of a whole series of language-internal and language-external factors that account for much of the language variation that can be observed in the Low Countries are encouraged to read Van der Gucht et al. (2017) and Jansen et al. (2018). Overviews on the structural features and the use of Dutch as a primary language in Suriname and the Caribbean, and as a heritage language in the USA, Australia and Indonesia are available in the volume Language and Space: Dutch (Hinskens & Taeldeman, 2013). The chapters in this volume contain information on the use of Dutch in a variety of language contact situations that, albeit in a different manner, since long also mark the linguistic landscape of Frans Vlaanderen (French-Dutch language contact), parts of the Netherlands (Dutch-Frisian language contact in Frsylân) as well as in Belgium (Dutch-French language contact in the Brussels Region and alongside the Germanic-Romance language border; see Peersman et al., 2015). The volume also offers a rich bibliography and an illuminating account of the history of research in the field of dialectology and language variation.
A glance at the history of sociolinguistics in the Dutch language area While the more systematic advancement of sociolinguistics in the Low Countries dates back to the 1960s, sociolinguistic principles and observations avant la lettre mark quite a number of writings that were published in the 16th, 17th and 18th century (see, e.g., Boves & Gerritsen, 1995). There also is a consensus on the fact that both the field of dialectology and what is referred to as ‘historische Neerlandistiek’ (historical Dutch studies) helped to pave the way for a swift development of the sociolinguistics of Dutch in the slipstream of North American pioneers. Persons who have marked the early days and the first couple of decades of Dutch sociolinguistics can easily be identified in the Belgian and the Dutch sociolinguistic bibliographies in the yearbook Sociolinguistica (see Darquennes, 2020) as well as in overview articles such as Willemyns (2006) and Darquennes (2010). These overviews show that sociolinguistics in the Dutch language area in Europa quite soon covered most of the research topics that are considered to be part of the sociolinguistics of language and the sociolinguistics of society. The joint volumes of Taal & Tongval (the only journal devoted to the sociolinguistics of Dutch) confirm this assessment.
Information collected for this overview The previous overview (Darquennes, 2010) relied on information collected and synthetized partly in publications from Anéla, i.e. the Dutch Association of Applied Linguistics. For quite a number of years, Anéla organized sociolinguistic conferences in the small Dutch town of Lunteren. These conferences are now annually organized as applied linguistics conferences in different Dutch cities, yet no longer result in publications that offer a synthesis of the topics covered by applied linguists and sociolinguists who are (mainly) based in Flanders and The Netherlands. So far, the Sociolinguistics Circle that was put into place by scholars working in The Netherlands (Leonie Cornips, Stefan Grondelaers, Nanna Haug Hilton, Roeland Van Hout, Remco Knooihuizen, Jacomine Nortier, Jos Swanenberg, Hans Van De Velde) and Flanders (Veronique De Tier) has not given rise to papers or chapters that offer a state of the art of 446
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sociolinguistics in the Low Countries either. As one can imagine, that renders the task to provide an overview of current sociolinguistic research on Dutch as it takes place in the heartland of the Dutch language area (let alone beyond that area) quite daunting. In order to provide as rich an overview as possible, the author of this chapter therefore resorted to the websites of departments, research centers or institutes active in the field of language, culture and linguistics at Flemish and Dutch universities. Time constraints did not allow a systematic scan of the websites of the many university colleges in the heartland of the Dutch language area, notwithstanding the fact that they also increasingly engage in producing research (see www.nvao.net for a complete list of Flemish and Dutch universities and university colleges). Readers who are not all that familiar with the research landscape in Flanders and The Netherlands should be aware of the fact that a number of (research) academies are also partly active in the field of sociolinguistics. That is the case for the Meertens Institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (meertens.knaw.nl) that promotes research on language variation, language contact, Dutch as an academic language, and language and culture in the province of Limburg. The Fryske Akademy (fryske-akademy.nl) hosts researchers that focus on the Frisian language and aspects of societal and individual multilingualism in the province of Fryslân and beyond. The Royal Academy of Dutch language and literature (kantl.be) located in Ghent (Flanders) devotes part of its attention to the (sociolinguistic) study of the history of the Dutch language. The Stichting Nederlandse Dialecten (Foundation for Dutch dialects) is a Flemish-Dutch institute that was established in 1990 and promotes collaboration between Flemish and Dutch researchers on dialects (nederlandsedialecten.org). It is part of the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (Institute for the Dutch Language) that itself plays a central role in documenting the history of the Dutch language (ivdnt.org). The website of the Taalunie (taalunie.org), an organization that plays a crucial role in the development of language policy initiatives in Flanders, The Netherlands and Suriname and promotes Dutch worldwide, contains information on various aspects related to the structure, the use and the status of contemporary (varieties of) Dutch.
Topics covered in contemporary sociolinguistic research Given the limited space available and the nature of sociolinguistic research in the Low Countries, the decision was made to present the heterogeneous information collected for the purposes of this chapter in five categories that broadly fit in with some of the categories suggested by the editors of this volume: language variation and change; language contact, individual and societal multilingualism; language dynamics in educational settings; (intercultural) interaction and conversation analysis; and historical sociolinguistics. It goes without saying that the boundaries between these categories are fluid. Nevertheless, it is assumed that the tentative categorization presented here will help to capture the diversity of ongoing sociolinguistic research in Flanders and The Netherlands.
Language variation and change The lion’s share of sociolinguistic research on Dutch is still to be situated in the field of language variation and change that, broadly defined, covers overlapping features of diatopic, diastratic, diamesic and other types of variation. De Sutter’s (2017) edited volume on language variation provides an overview of the many faces of Dutch in Flanders. Frans Hinskens (who holds the Meertens chair on language variation in The Netherlands) and Tom Goeman jointly published an article that covers 40 years of synchronic research on language variation in the Dutch language area (Hinskens & Goeman, 2013). Complementary information is available in Hinskens and Taeldeman (2013). 447
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What the inventories show is that, as far as research on diatopic variation is concerned, researchers increasingly engage in in-depth research related to phenomena documented in dialect atlases such as FAND, MAND and SAND (i.e. the Phonological, Morphological and Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects; see https://projecten.meertens.knaw.nl/mand/ for details) that were the results of bigger cross-border (i.e. Flemish-Dutch) research projects. Next to work focusing on syntactic, phonological and lexical aspects of dialects as such, a considerable amount of attention (if not most of it) is devoted to projects that seek to compare lexical, functional, structural and phonetic features of different sorts of varieties of Dutch. Examples are Swanenberg et al. (2021) who discuss lexical variation from Delfzijl in the north of The Netherlands to Dunkirk in France, Cornips (2020) who pays attention to the effect of preschool language socialization activities on children’s bidialectism, Doreleijers et al. (2021) who examine the effects of dialect-standard contact, and Van Heuven and Van De Velde (2010) who focus on the pronunciation of contemporary Dutch in the Low Countries. Especially in recent years, research on spoken Dutch is gaining traction. Guided by Hans Van De Velde (based at Utrecht University and the Fryske Akademy), a new generation of sociolinguists focuses on ways of identifying, measuring and assessing regional pronunciation differences (see, e.g., Pinget et al., 2014). Upon completion of its decade-long tradition of dialect dictionary compilation, Ghent University likewise started exploring new pathways for analyzing the structure and the evolution of dialect, standard and intermediate varieties of spoken Dutch, spearheaded by Anne-Sophie Ghyselen’s work (2016), thereby using a quantitative, multivariate sociolinguistic perspective and combining production and perception data (see also Lybaert, 2014), rather than focusing above all on language behavior (Grondelaers & Van Hout, 2011). Dialect loss and variation in spoken Dutch is also at the heart of Sarah Van Hoof’s (2015) sociolinguistic analysis of the use of Dutch in television soaps on the Flemish public broadcasting channel and of research on the use that is made of Dutch by youngsters on social media or more generally (Vandekerckhove & Nobels, 2010). This kind of research obviously touches on another topic that receives quite some attention and, because of its language ideological component, also causes quite some commotion: i.e. the tension between (changing) norms and usage of Standard Dutch, and the accompanying concepts of destandardization and demotization. Publications on the expanding use of so-called intermediate varieties of Dutch in Flanders – known as ‘verkavelingsvlaams’ or ‘tussentaal’ (Absilis et al., 2012; De Caluwe et al., 2015), and the accompanying consequences for the impact and prestige of the standard variety, sparked language ideological debates both within and far beyond the community of Dutch linguistics. At the level of the Taalunie, that question is also regularly tackled with the aim of developing a common vision on how to deal with language variation, e.g. in educational settings (see Adviescommissie Taalvariatie, 2019; for an assessment of that vision, see Vandenbussche, 2019). A relatively new line of research that cannot fail in a section on language variation and change is the one entitled ‘cognitive sociolinguistics’, or, alternatively (even if this denomination is less frequently used), variationist cognitive linguistics. As explained by Dirk Geeraerts, this line of research is based on the assumption that cognitive linguistics, as a usage-based approach to language, needs to take language-internal variation into account (see Geeraerts, 2018).
Language contact, individual and societal multilingualism Members of the QLVL research group (QLVL = Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics) at KULeuven are not only at the forefront of cognitive sociolinguistic research. They also play a role in the development of yet another relatively new branch of linguistics called cognitive contact linguistics (Zenner et al., 2018). Parts of Eline Zenner’s work, for example, 448
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concentrate on an analysis of English loanwords and phrases in expressive utterances in Dutch (see, e.g., Zenner et al., 2014) and thus nicely complement research on other types of language contact that can be observed in the Low Countries. Within the broad field of language contact research (see Darquennes et al., 2019), especially research on contact varieties, some of them known as ethnolects, is thriving (for an overview of ethnolect research in the Netherlands, see Hinskens, 2015). Research that reflects the features and/or the status and identity-related aspects of the languages used by (young) persons with a migration background on Belgian and Dutch soil includes, but is not limited to, work on urban youth vernaculars in Utrecht (see, e.g., Nortier, 2016), research on Turkish-Dutch code-switching (Backus, 2017) and Moroccan-Dutch speech in The Netherlands (Grondelaers & van Gent, 2019) and Flanders (Jaspers, 2005). Together with Leonie Cornips, the late Pieter Muysken, a world authority in the field of language contact research, edited a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language entitled ‘Language in the mines’ (Cornips & Muysken, 2019). It contains an article on contact varieties used in the mining region around the town of Heerlen in the Dutch Province of Limburg (Cornips & de Rooij, 2019) and two contributions on Dutch-Italian and Dutch-German contact varieties used in the mining regions in the Belgian Province of Limburg (Marzo, 2019; Pecht, 2019). Often adding a language policy perspective, researchers at Tilburg University (home of the late Jan Blommaert who contributed in a multifaceted way to the advancement of the sociolinguistics of globalization) focus among many other things on language use, language attitudes and language identity formation processes typical of ‘new speakers of Dutch’ originating from many different corners of the world (see, e.g., Kroon & Kurvers, 2020). As one of the many Dutch-oriented linguists responding to the ubiquitous superdiversity paradigm, Van Mensel (2016) pays attention to similar phenomena in Brussels. Focusing on the interplay between family language policies and official language policy, his research (as well as that of Vandenbroucke, 2020) is a rich ethnographic complement to the macro-sociolinguistic surveys of the late Rudi Janssens at the BRIO research center (see Janssens, 2019; www.briobrussel. be) as well as to research situated at the crossroads of sociolinguistics and political philosophy (De Schutter, 2021) or sociolinguistics, political philosophy and economics (Van Parijs, 2018). Apart from contributing to research on linguistic landscapes in the Low Countries, Rudi Janssens was also involved in discussions on the Frisian language survey that was coordinated by researchers at the Fryske Akademie and the Mercator Research Center on Multilingualism and Language Learning. The survey (Klinkenberg, 2017) provides information on language acquisition, use and attitudes in Fryslân. Most of the attention of the Mercator researchers is, however, devoted to aspects related to multilingual education.
Language dynamics in educational settings Researchers at Mercator or working closely together with Mercator not only devote attention to the use and the acquisition of Frisian (as part of trilingual or bilingual models) in compulsory education (Duarte & Günther-van der Meij, 2018), but also on the language development of bilingual (Frisian-Dutch) toddlers in Fryslân (Dijkstra et al., 2016; see, e.g., also Thieme et al., 2021 on a variety of other contexts) and more generally on multilingual interaction in Dutch secondary education (Duarte & Günther-van der Meij, 2020). That last line of research is closely connected to research of other researchers in The Netherlands and Flanders on language practices and the pedagogical challenges that teachers face either at schools that host children with a migration background (see De Backer et al., 2019; Jordens et al., 2016) or in the context of language courses organized for newcomers or asylum seekers (see, e.g., Spotti, 2019). Other topics that are well 449
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studied from a variety of sociolinguistic angles include bilingual education and content and language integrated learning at the level of primary and secondary schools (see Bulté et al., 2022; de Graaff & Costache, 2020; Oattes et al., 2018; Van Mensel et al., 2020) as well as complexity in second language learning (Housen et al., 2019; Kuiken & Vedder, 2019). Yet another muchdebated research topic is language use and particularly the role of English in higher education (see, e.g., Thieme & Vander Beken, 2020; Edwards, 2020; Vandenbussche, 2020; van Splunder, 2021). Flemish researchers also tend to focus on beliefs and ideas about the role and the use of different varieties of Dutch in educational settings. Delarue (2016) is one of many linguists systematically focussing on the impact of the aformentioned processes of destandardization and demotization on educational practices.
Conversation analysis and (intercultural) interaction Many scholars in various research centers and departments of universities in Flanders (Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, Leuven) and The Netherlands (Amsterdam, Groningen, Utrecht, Tilburg, Wageningen, . . .) engage in research on (intercultural) interaction and conversations in different settings. Examples include Cox et al. (2019), De Wilde et al. (2018) and Schuurman et al. (2021) on health care settings; Gelan et al. (2018) on the workplace; Blees et al. (2014) on student interactions; and Van De Mieroop et al. (2016) on more informal settings such as dinner table conversations.
Historical sociolinguistics The previous overview of sociolinguistics in the Dutch language area (Darquennes, 2010) already mentioned the growing attention given to historical sociolinguistic topics. Driven by research groups at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Universiteit Leiden and by the solid anchoring of the leading international ‘Historical Sociolinguistics Network’ (HiSoN) in these institutions, it not only covers research on (variation in) 19th-, 18th- and 17th-century Dutch (see, e.g., Krogull & Rutten, 2021), but also on language contact and individual as well as societal multilingualism in a historical perspective (see, e.g., Rutten & Vosters, 2020; Puttaert et al., 2019). As such, this research school is key for the reinterpretation of (the ideologically laden) social language history in the Low Countries on the basis of facts and newly discovered archival data; its orientation on egodocuments and language policy further serves as a guiding touchstone for international research in the field. Historical sociolinguistics has developed rapidly over the past years and is still gaining traction.
Outlook As already mentioned, the present overview is everything but exhaustive. Not only would certain topics deserve to be treated in more detail. More attention ought to be given to (socio)linguistic research on (varieties of) Dutch as it takes place at universities in the francophone part of Belgium and elsewhere in the many thriving university departments of Dutch in Europe in Europe (Berlin, Budapest, Cologne, Duisburg, Poznan, Prague, Vienna, Zürich) and the rest of the world (Berkeley, Paramaribo, . . . see ivn.nu for an overview). Since taking stock of sociolinguistic research on Dutch at regular intervals could provide guidance to those wishing to develop the field further, one can only hope that one of the aforementioned (research) academies or organizations will sooner rather than later take that task to heart. 450
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39 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN THE NORDIC REGION Sally Boyd and Natalia Ganuza
Introduction This chapter presents an overview of sociolinguistic research from the Nordic region, which consists of five sovereign countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, as well as the autonomous and self-governing territories Greenland, Faroe Islands and the Åland Islands. Here we will focus on sociolinguistic research from the sovereign countries, which are presented in five separate country sections in the chapter. We begin each section with a short description of the sociolinguistic context, followed by an overview of the history and some of the traditions that have shaped the sociolinguistic research in each country. Every section also includes an overview of some more recent sociolinguistic studies, and a short bibliographic overview of the PhD theses published in sociolinguistics in each country since the mid-1990s, with a focus on those published after 2008. The scope of the chapter includes a relatively broad conceptualization of sociolinguistics. Due to restrictions of space, however, it does not encompass studies of historical sociolinguistics, interaction, or studies within the social sciences that do not have a clearly linguistic aim.
Sociolinguistics in Denmark Denmark is a relatively small country (43,094 km2) located to the south of Norway and Sweden, with a population of approximately 5.8 million inhabitants. On a general level, Denmark, like Iceland, Norway and Sweden, could be described as an ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse nation state, with a significant migrant population. The proportion of immigrants in Denmark is 10.5%, which is lower than in Sweden (18.1%), Norway (14.1%) and Iceland (14 %), but higher than in Finland (6.1%) (Østby & Gulbrandsen, 2022).1 However, although more than 120 different languages are estimated to be currently spoken in Denmark, it is more linguistically homogeneous than most other European countries (Jørgensen & Holmen, 2005; see also Faingold, 2020), and the majority of the languages have relatively few speakers (Quist, 2022). Unlike the other Nordic countries, Denmark has no enacted language act, and Danish is the only official language. There are no recognized autochthonous minorities, with the exception of a small German-speaking group in South Jutland, which is acknowledged through a bilateral agreement between Denmark and Germany (Faingold, 2020). Denmark is often DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-45 454
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described as a highly standardized language community, since there is relatively little dialectal variation across different regions (Pedersen, 2003, 2005; Maegaard et al., 2020). Recent studies show, however, that the processes of standardization have taken somewhat different routes in different regions, and that the use of standard Danish is infused with varying social meanings in different local regional settings (Maegaard et al., 2020). In the late 1990s, Kristiansen and Jørgensen (1998) described sociolinguistic research in Denmark as being both pervasive and hard to find. They claimed that it was difficult to find in the form of chairs, obligatory courses or special centers, but pervasive in the sense that almost all Danish linguists worked in sociolinguistics in the broad sense. On a general level, this observation continues to be valid today. According to Quist (2022), Danish sociolinguistics can largely be grouped into two distinct research strands: one with roots in dialectology and variationist linguistics, and one with roots in bilingualism research and linguistic ethnography (pp. 186–205). American-style sociolinguistics became influential in the late 1960s, after Mogens Baumann Larsen returned from a visit to the US and held a lecture in Copenhagen entitled Renewal in American dialectology (Pedersen, 2000, p. 18). In the 1980s, Frans Gregersen and his colleagues at the University of Copenhagen carried out a major project on socio-phonetic variation in the Copenhagen dialect, heavily influenced by the Labovian tradition (e.g. Gregersen & Pedersen, 1991). A few years later, Jens Normann Jørgensen, at the same university, began a longitudinal research project on the language of children and youth with Turkish background in the Danish town of Køge (e.g. Jørgensen, 2003). This project paved the way for later research on bilingualism and linguistic ethnography. In 2005, Gregersen founded the Centre for Language Change in Real Time (LANCHART, for short), which aimed to strengthen research on language variation and change in Denmark in modern times. Research conducted at the center has encompassed a wide range of different perspectives on phonetic and grammatical variation and change, dialect use, language attitudes, language practices of children and adolescents, and social media practices. One of the more recent projects was Dialect in the Periphery, a large-scale comparative study of three different rural speech communities in Denmark, led by Marie Maegaard (for an overview, see e.g. Maegaard et al., 2020). Another project was Language and Place – Linguistic Variation in Country and City (LaPUR), led by Pia Quist, which investigated the interrelationship between people’s conceptions of and orientations to particular places and the extent to which they employ dialect, contemporary urban vernaculars and standardized Danish (see e.g. Monka et al., 2020; Quist & Skovse, 2020). Moreover, The Sound of Copenhagen is an ongoing collaborative project between the Copenhagen Museum, The Moesgaard Museum, The University of Copenhagen and the Digital Town Gate. One of the sub-projects, led by Quist, focuses on Copenhagen citizens’ stories about learning and using language in Copenhagen, and their experiences of language in connection to different parts of the city. The research group Copenhagen Studies in Everyday Languaging was founded at the University of Copenhagen in 2009. Over the course of several years, the researchers in the group collected data in the same urban school, focusing on children and adolescents’ everyday languaging, the forming of linguistic norms and ideologies, social media practices and mother tongue education (see e.g. Madsen et al., 2016). Some of the researchers from the group have continued to collaborate in the project Language and Social Media in the Family (SoMeFamily), led by Andreas Candefors Stæhr, which investigates social media communication in families and across generations (e.g. Stæhr & Nørreby, 2021). Another project is Interpreting in Institutional Interaction: Sociolinguistic Challenges in Denmark as a Globalized Society, led by Martha Sif Karrebæk, which sets out to investigate communicative challenges between interpreters and citizens in the public sector (e.g. Karrebæk & Kirilova, 2022). 455
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The Centre for Internationalisation and Parallell Language Use, led by Anne Holmen at the University of Copenhagen, is another important meeting ground for contemporary Danish sociolinguists. Researchers from the center have, for example, conducted investigations in the areas of language policy and planning and the challenges and opportunities associated with the internationalization of Danish universities (see e.g. Fabricius et al., 2017; Holmen, 2015, 2018; Mortensen, 2017). A predecessor to this line of research was the work of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, who published widely on language minorities, multilingual education, linguistic human rights and the spread of English in the Nordic countries, from the 1980s and onwards. For the earlier edition of this book, the first author presented an overview of 18 sociolinguistic PhD dissertations that were published in Denmark 1995–2007. For the current edition, we extended the search to include dissertations published 2008–2021. We were able to find 49 Danish dissertations during this later period that could broadly be categorized as sociolinguistic. The majority focus on linguistic practices among youths, language and social positioning, and language attitudes. They also encompass studies of language policy and planning, language variation and change, and the role and spread of English in Denmark. Hence, the dissertations largely continue to build on the earlier established traditions of Danish sociolinguistics. The sociolinguistic dissertations that we were able to find come from all of the major universities in Denmark, although dissertations from the University of Copenhagen prevail. In terms of language choice, 26 of the 49 dissertations published between 2008 and 2021 were written in English, 22 in Danish and one in German.
Sociolinguistics in Finland Finland’s area is 338,455 km2; it has a population of 5.5 million, so it is about the same area and population as Norway, but smaller than Sweden. Unlike the other Nordic countries, Finland was founded as an officially bilingual country, where Swedish and Finnish are both official languages, with officially equal status. The country also recognizes three varieties of Sámi, Romani, Finnish Sign Language and Karelian as official minority languages. About 5.2% of the population have declared themselves to be native speakers of Swedish (Saarela, 2021), while Finnish is the declared first language of 87.6% of the population. Despite the seemingly rather low percentage of native speakers of Swedish, they have an unusually strong position in the country. This position can be traced to the historical relationship between the two language groups when the constitution of Finland as an independent country was formulated about 100 years ago. The region that is at present Sweden and Finland was a single country, dominated by Swedish-speakers, for over 700 years. Bilingualism in Finnish and Swedish is still required for certain official posts in Finland. There are Swedish medium schools in the bilingual parts of the country, which include certain coastal areas including the capital. There is also a university (Åbo Academi University) where the primary language is Swedish. The other major universities carry out teaching and research in both official languages. Immigration to Finland has increased in recent years but remains at a lower level than in most other Nordic countries. As in some of the other Nordic countries, sociolinguistic research can be traced back to a trip by a Finnish linguist, Matti Leiwo, to the United States, during which he came into contact with Labovian variationist linguistics. This visit led to the development of several strands of sociolinguistically oriented research in Finland in subsequent decades: historical, corpus-based research on English; research in applied linguistics; and research on language variation and change. One of the earliest major sociolinguistic projects was a corpus linguistic project on historical texts in English, VARIENG, initiated at the University of Helsinki in the early 1970s and currently 456
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headed by Terttu Nevalainen. This project applies Labovian sociolinguistic methods to historical, textual data in English. The project has had Centre of Excellence status in two periods, from 2000– 2005 and 2006–2011. During the second period, the scope of the project was extended to language contact, and the methods broadened to include ethnographic ones. Its research includes the role of English in the repertoire of multilingual speakers (e.g. Laitinen, 2013) and research on discourse and pragmatic variation in Finnish as a result of contact with English (e.g. Peterson et al., 2021). Finland’s bilingual status, and the requirement of all children to study the other official language in school, has had definite consequences for Finnish sociolinguistic research, as research on applied linguistics, particularly in school contexts, is very strong. The Centre for Applied Language Study (CALS) at the University of Jyväskylä grew out of the national responsibility it was given in 1974 to co-ordinate the language centers which each Finnish university was required to establish to teach and test proficiency in both the two official languages and foreign languages. This research is focused on applied linguistics, but is interdisciplinary, including research with a definite sociolinguistic orientation. For example, Pitkänen-Huhta and Rothoni’s (2018) research on the role of English in different European contexts, and Pietikänen and Pitkänen-Huhta’s research (2013) on literacy practices in Sámi classrooms are also relevant to sociolinguistics. Palviainen has conducted research into bilingualism in the family (e.g. Palviainen & Bergroth, 2018) including digital practices supporting bilingualism in family contexts (e.g. Palviainen, 2021). Hult and Pietikäinen (2014) have carried out research on attitudes towards the role of Swedish in Finnish schools and its relation to the broader question of Finland as a bilingual country. Pöyhonen has carried out sociolinguistic research focusing on identity in various educational contexts; most recently she has studied the consequences of the forced choice of Finnish as the first language learned by asylum seekers in Finland (Pöyhonen & Simpson, 2021). Laihonen has together with colleagues at CALS (see e.g. Laihonen & Szabó, 2018) been studying language contact and ideology in Romania, particularly in school-related contexts. As will be seen later, a large proportion of Finnish dissertations with a sociolinguistic label come from the Jyväskylä context. The study of variation and change in Finland is best exemplified by a longitudinal study, initiated in the 1970s, of variation in the Finnish of Helsinki. Interview data from that period are included in a corpus of transcriptions, which also includes similar data from the 1990s and a third cycle in 2013. A study of a large number of phonological, morphological and lexical variables has recently been published in the journal Language Variation and Change (Kuparinen et al., 2021). Most of the authors are active at the University of Tampere. Much of the previous research on this corpus has been published in Finnish, but Paunonen (1994) reports on research based on the second datacollection cycle and Halonen and Vaattovaara (2017) published data on one variable internationally. Other ongoing variationist research includes that of Lehtonen and Paunonen (2022) on the language(s) of young people in Helsinki, including the role of English in their linguistic repertoire. In addition to these major research strands and environments, research with a sociolinguistic orientation has been carried out at other Finnish universities. At the University of Eastern Finland, the GlobE project was carried out from 2010–2014 on Global English. There have also been projects there on Karelian and Eastern Finnish dialectology. At the University of Oulu, a center for language and culture contact has been established, which includes researchers with sociolinguistics as an interest (e.g. Kunnas, 2009). The University of Vaasa is located in the city with the highest proportion of Swedish speakers in Finland. This university has been the site of a number of studies of immersion education, another research area for which Finland is well-known internationally. Many of these studies have been directed by Siv Björklund, who is currently broadening her area of interest to include linguistic landscapes for example, but still focused on language immersion contexts (Pakarinen & Björklund, 2018). 457
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When the first author searched for dissertations in sociolinguistics for the previous edition of this volume (1995–2007), she found 35, including many dissertations in bi/multilingualism and interaction/conversation. Our search for dissertations since that date (2008–2021) produced a total of 40, including about ten each in interaction/communication and in bi/multilingualism and about eight in other topics. Many of the latter are dissertations in applied linguistics. The universities with most sociolinguistic dissertations are the University of Jyväskylä with 18 dissertations, Helsinki with nine and Oulu with eight. The other universities have produced one or two with sociolinguistics (or its equivalents) as a keyword. The vast majority of these dissertations are written in English (29), four each are written in Finnish and Swedish, and one each in Spanish, German and French. This is an indication of the internationalization of Finnish research in this area that has taken place in recent decades.
Sociolinguistics in Iceland Iceland is the smallest independent country in the Nordic region, with an area of 102,775 km2 and a population of only 371,580. It has historically had a very homogeneous population but has in recent decades begun accepting immigrants. The national language and the heritage of the Icelandic sagas play a major role in national identity and led to a strong role for language cultivation. Given Icelandic’s assumed character of homogeneity and stability, it is not so surprising that until recently there has not been as much sociolinguistic research carried out here as elsewhere in the Nordic region. A few recent research projects have nonetheless been undertaken with the role of English in Iceland as a basic question. Ari Páll Kristinsson has previously been writing sociolinguistic articles on Icelandic and language in the Nordic region (e.g. Kristinsson, 2014) and has more recently carried out research on digital language contact. Helga Hilmisdóttir leads a project on youth language in Iceland (2018). Other recent initiatives have looked at language contact between English and Icelandic among young people on line. As Iceland has begun receiving more immigrants, research has been initiated on Icelandic as a second language. This includes ethnographic research by Innes and colleagues in both Akureyri and Reykjavik on adult learners’ perspectives on learning and using Icelandic as a second language (e.g. Skaptadóttir & Innes, 2017). Gunnþórsdóttir and colleagues (2019) have also recently carried out research on inclusive education with a sociolinguistic perspective. Our search for doctoral dissertations with a clear sociolinguistic theory or method turned up less than a handful. Óladóttir (2017) concerns language policy in relation to school language, and Viðarsson (2019) looks at historical variation and change in Icelandic. Blöndal’s interactional study (2015) and Friðriksson’s variationist dissertation (2008) were sociolinguistic theses about Icelandic awarded in Helsinki and Gothenburg respectively. The two other theses have been earned at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. All four dissertations’ main texts are in English. In sum, sociolinguistics on Icelandic and in Iceland is small and generally of recent vintage.
Sociolinguistics in Norway Norway is a country of 385,207 km2 and a population of approximately 5.5 million people, making it smaller than Sweden both in terms of area and population. The fact that Norway has two written standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, is widely known, but perhaps not the fact that dialects are legally protected in Norway; schools are explicitly prohibited from trying to change the way children speak their native language (Wiggen, 1995). Among the Nordic countries, Norway has 458
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the reputation for having a high tolerance for linguistic variation, and a relatively good record for protecting not only Norwegian dialects but also the Sámi minority’s language rights. This is the only country in the Nordic region where Sámi is an official language (together with Norwegian), protected by the constitution, while Kven, Romani and Romanes are official minority languages. The initiatives of Bengt Loman, a Swede, and Mogens Baumann Larsen, a Dane, in the area of sociolinguistics in the 1970s landed also in Norway on the “fertile soil” of a strong tradition of dialectology, as they had in Denmark and Sweden. Mæhlum (1996, p. 199) writes that Labovian sociolinguistics was then the dominant tradition within Norway. This chapter and our survey of recent doctoral dissertations indicate that this is no longer the case. Rather, the dominant theme is currently bi- and multilingualism. This is probably due to strong local initiatives in Oslo, where relatively many of Norway’s immigrants live. There are two centers for research on bi/multilingualism in Norway, each with a somewhat different profile. The one at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø focuses on language contact between Norwegian and the minority languages Sámi and Kven (e.g. Hiss et al., 2021), which are indigenous in this part of the country. The research themes include multilingualism in education (e.g. Sollid, 2012), multilingualism at work, and onomastics in bilingual families (Alhaug & Saarelma, 2017). Tove Bull played an important role in establishing sociolinguistic research here, on topics including not only northern Norwegian language contact (Bull, 2018) but also language and gender. The other major center for research in multilingualism is at the University of Oslo. Research in this area is concentrated in the Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan (MultiLing), which is designated as a Norwegian Centre of Excellence and involves collaboration with eminent researchers from other parts of the world. The center, initiated by Elizabeth Lanza and Bente A. Svendsen, currently has Unn Røyneland as its director. Lanza’s main research interests have focused on the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, including family language policy (Lanza & Curdt-Christiansen, 2018), language and identity, and linguistic landscapes. The collection of Røyneland and Blackwood (2022) demonstrates the diversity of research at the center, including its current three themes: (1) multilingual competence, (2) multilingual language practices and (3) multilingual ideologies and language policies, including toward indigenous languages. Within the theme of multilingual language practices, Aneta Pavlenko has collaborated on studies of forensic (or legal) linguistics and the comprehension of legal rights in multilingual interaction (e.g. Urbanik & Pavlenko, 2021). Røyneland and Jensen (2020) have also studied the question of the acquisition of Norwegian dialects by speakers of other languages, a topic bridging the study of dialects and of multilingualism. Furthermore, Svendsen (2022) provides an overview of research on contemporary Norwegian urban speech styles. Although Mæhlum (1996) claimed that Labovian-style research dominated sociolinguistics in Norway in the mid-1990s, research in language variation and dialectology is currently relatively sparse, compared to research on multilingualism. Research on structural aspects of dialect and language contact in northernmost Norway can be found in Tromsø and in Trondheim, on heritage languages among others. Strand (2020) has also recently carried out research on variation between dialect and standard in children’s role play. In Trondheim, Melum Eide and Åfarli (2019) have carried out research on intra-individual morphosyntactic variation. Studies involving English in Norway concern the acquisition of English in multilingual classrooms, while Rindal (2014) has looked at pronunciation of English by Norwegian speakers and attitudes towards varieties of English among young learners of the language. One trend that can be noted in Norway, particularly at MultiLing in Oslo, are sociolinguistic studies set in places elsewhere than Norway, often outside Europe. For example, Shang and Zhao (2017) have carried out research on language standardization of Chinese 459
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in Singapore; Berezkina (2017) has looked at the commodification of Russian in Estonia and Purkarthofer and De Korne (2020) have studied minority education in Mexico. Likewise, Mohr in Trondheim studies sign language and English in Africa from a sociolinguistic perspective (e.g. Mohr et al., 2020). A search for sociolinguistic dissertations defended in Norway since 2008 produced a total of 29 works. Almost two thirds of these can be categorized as treating various aspects of bi/multilingualism, including several studies of bilingualism in a school context and a few of bilingual interaction. Only six can be categorized as studies of dialects, variation and change or historical sociolinguistics. An additional two are studies of interaction in Norwegian and two concern language policy. This can be contrasted with a similar search in 2008, where there were more dissertations in variationism and dialectology than in multilingualism. Four of the 29 doctoral dissertations are sociolinguistic studies undertaken outside Norway. At least half of the recent dissertations in the database were defended in Oslo. Less than half of the 29 dissertations are written in Norwegian, the remainder in English.
Sociolinguistics in Sweden Sweden is the largest country in the Nordic region, with an area of 450,000 km² and almost 10.4 million inhabitants. In 2009, through the enactment of the Swedish Language Act (Ministry of Culture, 2009), Swedish was officially declared the principal language in Sweden. The Act also recognizes the five national minority languages Finnish, Meänkieli, Romany Chib, Sámi and Yiddish, and states that the public sector has a responsibility to protect and promote Swedish Sign Language. Due to many years of extensive migration to Sweden, today more than 200 languages are expected to be spoken in the country (e.g. Parkvall, 2015). According to the Language Act, all of Sweden’s inhabitants, whose mother tongue is not Swedish, nor one of the five national minority languages, should be given the opportunity to develop and use this language. In compulsory school, for example, students who have a caregiver with a mother tongue other than Swedish are entitled to an elective subject called “mother tongue instruction” (e.g. Ganuza & Hedman, 2015). As the other Nordic countries, Sweden has had a strong tradition of dialectological research. Two pioneering Swedish sociolinguists were Bengt Loman and Bengt Nordberg. Loman became a professor of Scandinavian languages at Lund University in the 1960s (later also at Åbo Academi University in Finland) and was the founder of the project Talsyntax (the syntax of speech, e.g. Loman, 1972), which focused on stylistic and social variation in modern spoken Swedish. Nordberg became the first chair professor of sociolinguistics when he was installed at Uppsala University in the late 1970s. He was mostly known for his sociolinguistic study of the language use and change in the Swedish town of Eskilstuna (Nordberg, 1976), in which he focused on the phonological and morphological variation of speakers of different ages, gender and social class, in the Labovian tradition (see also the follow-up study by Sundgren, 2002). In the 1980s, Nordberg led a Nordic research program on the effects of urbanization on language variation in the Nordic region (Nordberg, 1994). He was also one of the founders of the so-called FUMS center (Research and Education in Modern Swedish), which played an important role in the early promotion of sociolinguistics in Sweden. The Centre for Research on Bilingualism, founded in the 1980s at Stockholm University and led by Kenneth Hyltenstam until 2007, has hosted a large number of sociolinguistic studies about minority language maintenance and shift, language policy and planning, multilingual practices and multilingualism in diverse educational settings (for an overview, see Salö et al., 2021). The Centre 460
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has also been important in establishing a focus on transnational multilingualism in the Nordic region, with various collaborative projects with researchers from Brazil, Mozambique and South Africa (see, for example, the work of Christopher Stroud and Caroline Kerfoot, both active at the Centre). In Sweden, unlike in Denmark for example, sociolinguistics is pervasive in the sense that it forms an integral part of many language courses and programs at university level. Furthermore, there are several professorships with a focus on sociolinguistics, the sociology of language and multilingualism. Notwithstanding these favorable circumstances, there have been relatively few major sociolinguistic research programs in the last two decades. Most of the sociolinguistic research has been carried out by single researchers, or smaller research groups. In the 1980s, Ulla-Britt Kotsinas started her investigations into the language use of children and adolescents in multilingual areas on the outskirts of Stockholm (e.g. 1988, 1994). In particular, she focused on their use of certain innovative language features. The project Language and Language Use among Young People in Multilingual Urban Settings (the SUF-project, for short), carried out in the early 2000s, built on Kotsinas’s legacy. It brought together a dozen senior and junior researchers, with the aim to attain a more thorough understanding of the “new” urban varieties of Swedish developing in the linguistically and ethnically diverse urban areas of Sweden’s larger cities. A comprehensive corpus of oral and written data was compiled, which has formed the basis for analyses of phonology, syntactic variation, collocations, discourse particles, reflexive pronouns, narratives, strategies of politeness and negotiations of identity (for an overview, see e.g. Källström & Lindberg, 2011; see also Gross & Boyd, 2022, for a more recent overview of research on contemporary Swedish urban speech styles). The SUF-project led to the spin-off project Sociolinguistic Awareness and Language Attitudes in Multilingual Contexts (SALAM), carried out by Kari Fraurud and Ellen Bijvoet, which directed its attention to the perception of and attitudes towards different ways of using Swedish, in a folk linguistic research tradition (e.g. Bijvoet & Fraurud, 2012, 2016). Concurrent with the SUF-project were several ethnographic PhD projects that investigated linguistic practices and negotiations of belonging among adolescents from multilingual urban areas (e.g. Haglund, 2005; Jonsson, 2007, Kahlin, 2008). Rickard Jonsson has since then continued to explore constructions of masculinity, ethnicity and race in the language of youths in everyday school contexts, in projects such as Urban Speech Style and the Idea of Desirable Swedishness, and Disruptive Boys? Public and Local Narratives about Boys’ Rulebreaking Activities in School (e.g. Jonsson, 2014, 2018; see also Milani & Jonsson, 2012). In 2013, the research program Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages was awarded a grant to investigate and compare the characteristics and variation of Swedish spoken in different service-encounter contexts in Sweden and in Finland (for an overview, see Norrby et al., 2021). In 2018, the international research program Romani Language Repertoires in an Open World, led by Kimmo Granqvist, was awarded a grant to investigate the language repertoires, life stories, mobilities and social interactions of Roma people in the Nordic region, Central Europe, United Kingdom and Latin America (e.g. Granqvist, 2021). Unfortunately, the project was later discontinued. Three strands of Swedish sociolinguistics strike us as having expanded significantly in recent years: the role and spread of English (e.g. Hult, 2012; Salö & Josephson, 2014), language and sexuality (e.g. Milles, 2011; Ericsson, 2021; Milani et al., 2021), and linguistic landscape studies (an example being the project The Role of Language in Segregation and Gentrification Processes: Linguistic Landscapes in Gothenburg, led by Johan Järlehed at University of Gothenburg). Studies conducted at the intersection of sociolinguistics and education also continue to play an important role in Swedish sociolinguistics. 461
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For the earlier edition of this book, the first author found 106 Swedish sociolinguistic dissertations published between 1995 and 2007, and for this edition, we found another 75 sociolinguistic dissertations published between 2008 and 2020. More than half of those produced during the later period were published in English (44 of 75, i.e. 59%), and only two in a language other than English or Swedish. The majority of the dissertations deal with issues of language policy and planning, language and identity, and linguistic practices among youth. There are also relatively many dissertations on different aspects of language variation and change, interaction, and the role and spread of English.
Conclusion We would like to point to some commonalities of sociolinguistics in the Nordic region. In all the countries, sociolinguistics built on a strong tradition of dialectology in the Nordic languages and Finnish. To this base was added variationism, through the visits of a few notable linguists to the United States in the 1970s. Dialectology and language variation were dominant themes of sociolinguistic research through the 1990s. We think that two major international developments have had a significant impact on sociolinguistics since then. The first one is international migration, particularly from countries outside Europe. What previously were perceived as linguistically homogeneous countries with standardized languages and dialects (albeit including Finland with its two official languages), now became in important ways multicultural societies. Multilingualism and the integration and education of migrants in all the Nordic countries have been important themes in sociolinguistic research in recent years. Iceland is the most recent example. Research on the indigenous minority languages has also increased significantly; this can be seen in part because of the minorities’ own struggles for linguistic rights and in part the result of international agreements among the countries of Europe as a whole. The other major development is what could be called linguistic globalization, which has accompanied other forms of globalization and internationalization in recent decades. This development has led to a greater interest in the study of the role of English in the Nordic countries, but also in studying sociolinguistic phenomena outside of the Nordic region. One example of the former was the topic of a special issue of International Journal of the Sociology of Language, edited by Kristiansen and Sandøy in, 2010, which looked at purism and attitudes towards English loans and structural influences in all the Nordic languages. A contribution to a theme issue on the related topic of the role of English in European universities (Hultgren & Thogersen, 2014), emanates from Copenhagen, but treats the entire Nordic region. The internationalization of university education has furthermore led to more doctoral dissertations being written in English today, and fewer in the Nordic languages and Finnish.
Note 1 These percentages include immigrants and descendants both of whose parents are immigrants, including migrants within the Nordic region.
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40 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN BRITAIN Natalie Braber
Introduction Since the previous edition of this handbook much sociolinguistic research has been carried out in Britain. It is impossible to cover all aspects of that work in a single chapter, so this is an outline to a selection of contemporary research which focuses on variationist studies investigating regional variation.
Geography and demography Britain, or Great Britain, encompasses England, Scotland and Wales, differing from the United Kingdom which includes Northern Ireland. Britain lies in the North Atlantic, off the west coast of Europe. It consists of about 6,000 islands and covers an area just under 210,000 km². In 2020 the population of Britain was 56,550,000 in England, 3,170,000 in Wales and 5,466,000 in Scotland (Office for National Statistics – ONS). London is the capital of England (and the whole of the United Kingdom) and the seat of government. Edinburgh and Cardiff are the capitals of Scotland and Wales respectively and house their devolved governments. Although Britain does not have an official language, English is the de-facto official language spoken by around 92% of the population. In Wales, both English and Welsh have official status and the Welsh language is protected by the Welsh Language Act 1993 and the Government of Wales Act 1998. The National Assembly for Wales has an official bilingual policy and bilingualism in the workplace is actively encouraged. Welsh language data from the Annual Population Survey shows that in 2021, 29.2% of people aged three and above were able to speak Welsh, equating to around 884,300 people. This was slightly higher than the previous year and is higher than the 21% reported in the 2001 census data (Welsh Language Data, 2021). These figures suggest that Welsh speakers have been gradually increasing each year since March 2010, after they had been gradually declining from 2001 to 2007. In Scotland, Gaelic has official status through the Gaelic Language Act 2005 and although Scots is not recognised as an official language, there is a Scots Language Policy (Scottish Government, 2015) which aims to protect and promote its use. Since 2011, the census (Scotland’s Census, 2011, 2021) includes questions on Scots as well as other minority languages spoken in Scotland. The most recent Scottish data come from this census, which reports that more than 1.5 million people declared themselves as being able to speak Scots, and an additional 267,000 said they could 467
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understand it but not read, write or speak it. Just over 57,000 people said they could speak Gaelic (which is a fall from 59,000 in the 2001 census) and 23,000 people said they could understand it but not speak, read or write it. As in Wales, there is ongoing work to encourage and promote the education and use of these languages at different levels, from schooling to websites and social groups (for more details see Lawson, 2014, pp. 8–10). In addition to these indigenous languages (which also include Cornish, Manx and Anglo-Romani to name but a few), there are around 22,000 users of British Sign Language which is the first or preferred language among the Deaf community. There are also other languages which are widely spoken following migration, Polish has become the second-most common language in Britain with around 500,000 speakers (ONS). Other languages include Urdu, Punjabi, French and varieties of Chinese, often centre around large cities. The great majority of Britain’s population lives in towns and cities, and much linguistic research focuses on urban varieties, referred to by Trudgill as Modern Dialects, rather than the Traditional Dialects (Trudgill, 1999). There has also been a focus on dialect levelling, which examines the reduction of variation between different varieties (see Kerswill, 2003), and supra-dialectal variation, which examines whether particular linguistic features are spreading across the whole of Britain, with particular attention for southern forms spreading northward, for example, changes taking place around th-fronting, the foot/strut split or l-vocalisation. Three edited collections provide wide overviews of sociolinguistic research – Scotland (Lawson, 2014), Wales (Durham & Morris, 2016) and England (Braber & Jansen, 2018). These volumes outline the development of sociolinguistic theories in each of these countries and suggest fruitful directions for future studies. Each volume includes an introductory chapter providing a historical overview of sociolinguistic work carried out by various researchers.
Regional sociolinguistic variation The wealth of sociolinguistic research carried out in Britain can be presented from a regional perspective. Although splitting into geographical areas is obviously a simplification and isoglosses do not always fall clearly between regions, it allows discussion of different geographical locations. As well as some areas which have always been well covered (such as London, the North-East and areas around the North-West), this chapter also includes work on some under-researched areas, such as the East and West Midlands, as well as the South-West. It also covers research carried out in Scotland and Wales.
Scotland Rhoticity and how it is changing remain of great interest to sociolinguistic research in Scotland. Dickson and Hall-Lew (2017) compare realisations of /r/ with socio-economic class and find that it correlates both with social class and gender. They note that speakers who change their socioeconomic class during their lifetime (named as New Middle Class) show highest levels of rhoticity in Edinburgh. In Glasgow, research on /r/ (Sóskuthy & Stuart-Smith, 2020) with auditory and acoustic analysis on Glaswegian speakers examines weakening of coda /r/, reviews this in light of changes of voice quality and shows how results can change when broader linguistic contexts are included in linguistic analysis. Meer et al. (2021) analyse the rhoticity of formal speeches given in the Scottish parliament, confirm increasing non-rhoticity in many Scottish speakers and suggest linguists should consider language-external factors. An additional feature of interest to linguists interested in language variation in Scotland is the Scottish Vowel Length Rule which affects the timing of certain vowels depending on their morpho-phonemic environment. Rathcke and 468
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Stuart-Smith (2016) examine whether the duration of these traditional Scottish vowels is changing over time, perhaps due to contact with Anglo-English. Using Glasgow as a case study, they compare recordings from male speakers in the 1970s and 2000s and although they find some evidence of the weaking of the Rule, there is less evidence of this in Glasgow than in other regions of Scotland, perhaps due to less regular, everyday contact with these Anglo-English varieties. As well as speech production, there is also a focus on speech perception. Leslie’s (2020) work focuses on the perception of North-East Scottish speech in younger and older speakers and attitudes towards the local Doric variety, and although there is evidence of dialect attrition in younger speakers, the sense of belonging to a local community is still tied to local language varieties. Ryan (2021) examines which features are acquired by L2 speakers, with a focus on Polish adolescents in Glasgow. The study uses data from different social contexts and concentrates on word medial glottal replacement. By examining which constraints are adopted and which are not in particular speech styles, enables an examination of style as a constraint in language acquisition and shows that speakers are able to acquire the ability to know when to style-shift as they are acquiring language and do so as a means of fitting in with their new community. A Scots resource is the Scots Syntax Atlas which has collected language from 145 communities around Scotland to examine different syntactic constructions. The website presents the results of acceptability judgments on morphosyntactic phenomena. It contains a corpus of spoken data with over three million words. The database can be searched for particular examples of linguistic usage. In addition to research on Scottish English and Scots, there is ongoing research on Gaelic. It examines Gaelic spoken on the islands of Scotland where Gaelic was originally used (Nance, 2020) and Gaelic usage by young speakers in Glasgow in Gaelic medium education. Findings suggest (Nance, 2015) that young Glasgow speakers are developing a new variety of Gaelic, and in terms of their vowels, intonation and laterals, are showing different patterns to island young speakers. Although traditionally it was thought that such speakers lacked ‘authenticity’ of traditional forms, such new forms, which may be affected by their contact languages, can be examined to examine change as well as attitudes to being an L2 user (Nance et al., 2016).
Wales The level of bilingualism in Wales varies greatly between different communities and acquisition also differs, with learning at home or at school. Durham and Morris (2016, p. 12) state that the challenge in contemporary Wales is to normalise Welsh language use and promote linguistic choice among speakers. Much research in Wales focuses on bilingualism, language contact and attitudes towards the different languages. Durham (2016), for example, investigates attitudes towards Welsh using Twitter. This shows that for many a ‘Welsh’ accent is associated with the variety heard in the Valleys rather than other parts of the country. It seems that television shows (for example Gavin and Stacey) play a large role in making people aware of certain varieties and can also influence their attitudes towards them – positively and negatively. Morris (2021) investigates phonological transfer of /r/ in Welsh-English bilinguals’ speech in north Wales, comparing the influence of speaker gender, home language and speech context on the production of /r/ in both English and Welsh in two communities which differ in the amount of English and Welsh spoken. It is commonly assumed that the alveolar trill [r] and alveolar tap [ɾ] are the variants of /r/ in Welsh. In English, the alveolar approximant [ɹ] is typical across Wales, but the trill and tap are reported in areas where a high proportion of the population speaks Welsh. Morris’ results show regional differences in the production of /r/ in both languages, which could be attributed partly to differing social structures in these communities. 469
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Another comprehensive volume on Welsh English is Paulasto et al. (2020). It describes presentday accents and dialects of Welsh English arising from the combined outcome of historical language shift from Welsh to English, continued bilingualism, intense contacts between Wales and England, and multicultural immigration. It states that Welsh English is a distinctive, regionally and sociolinguistically diverse variety, whose status is not always easily categorised.
England There is a tradition of examining the linguistic markers which span the North-South divide (see for example Trudgill, 1999; Wells, 1986). But this is not a straightforward division and the Midlands do not fit into this classification. Linguistically, the question has been raised whether there is a clear boundary or whether there is a tripartite division (see Upton, 2012). As a result, we look at studies carried out in northern England, the Midlands and southern England. There are also studies which focus on particular ethnolects or on younger speakers, and these are included in the relevant areas.
The North of England The north of England has been the spotlight of much sociolinguistic research in recent decades; Hickey’s edited collection (2015) brings together various studies from different regions and linguistic features. Jansen (2021a) examines the prevalence of h-dropping in Maryport in Cumbria. This study shows that although h-dropping does not decrease even in the most formal styles for the older speakers, this is not the case for the younger speakers who seem to be avoiding this feature. Jansen suggests that these linguistic changes could be tied to social change as this region has seen the breakdown of local communities and high numbers of job losses. Other research suggests more change in progress, with linguistic features, e.g. t-glottalling entering the region and being used increasingly, particularly by younger speakers (Jansen, 2021b), evidencing change in peripheral areas. In the North-West, work has been conducted in Manchester and Greater Manchester. One of these projects is Manchester Voices, a research project based at Manchester Metropolitan University. This project aims to examine the accents, dialects and identities in Greater Manchester. Both production and attitudinal data have been collected by the ‘accent van’, where people make recordings of their voices and talk about local dialect. Much of this work has been mapped online to produce perceptual maps. Results so far suggest that local residents consider varieties in a range of ways – those which are seen as ‘high status’ (generally Trafford and Stockport) and the varieties used there are referred to as ‘soft’, more ‘rural’ varieties are seen as being socially attractive and the varieties used there are more likely to be referred to as ‘broad’ with urban regions having the lowest status and the language used there is most likely to be described as ‘strong’. These patterns confirm other attitudinal work carried out previously. Further evaluative work focuses on the feature [ŋg] in the North-West. Bailey (2018) found that older speakers are not sensitive to the dialectal status and therefore do not judge it differently from [ŋ], whereas for younger speakers this form seems to carry stronger northern indexicality and they show a greater awareness of this. Turton and Baranowski (2021) examine one of the most salient northern features, the lack of a foot/ strut split in Manchester, and find that although the majority of their speakers have no distinction between the vowels in minimal pair production, vowel height was correlated with social class. They suggest age grading where middle-class speakers may develop a phonetic distinction as they age. Work which focuses on age and ethnolect is represented in Drummond’s work on youth identity through Multicultural Urban British English (Drummond, 2018). It looks at the language of urban adolescents in two non-mainstream learning centres in Manchester. This research finds that 470
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there is a different and emerging way of speaking among some young people and that this shares features with Multicultural London English (MLE) but that more work needs to be carried out to describe whether there is a new variety. In the North-East, the DECTE corpus (Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English) is a publicly available on-line corpus which spans five decades and is made up of interview material (see Corrigan et al., 2012). There is research which examines levelling across the lifespan, for example with a focus on the face vowel. Buchstaller et al. (2017) state that apparent time analysis has revealed that the Tyneside face vowel shows two intersecting trends: levelling towards the supra-northern monophthong as well as the gradual incursion of the southern standard closing diphthong. There is also research on stative possessives, i.e. have versus have got in the NorthEast (Fehringer & Corrigan, 2015; Buchstaller & Mearns, 2018). These studies show that a trend towards the favouring of have got is affected by gender and social class, with middle class speakers and women overall less likely to use have got. An associated website, Talk of the Toon, integrates narratives with photographs and moving images, designed primarily for schools and museums. Such engagement with non-academic audiences is an ever-increasing crucial aspect of sociolinguistic study and allows for impactful research as well as engagement with the public. This also occurs in the Dialect and Heritage Project (2005) at the University of Leeds. It aims to update the Survey of English Dialects data from the 1950s and train volunteers to carry out interviews and share present-day dialect features. This project works closely with museums around the country to bring together dialect and vernacular heritage and share this with the widest possible audience. Finally, The Use and Utility of Localised Speech Forms in Determining Identity (TUULS) at the University of York aims to examine dialects spoken in three urban centres (Newcastle upon Tyne, Sunderland and Middlesborough) which share many linguistic properties, but have distinctive local identities and linguistic features. The analysis focuses on grammatical, lexical and discoursepragmatic features of speakers from these locales.
The Midlands of England In recent decades, the East Midlands has been relatively neglected in sociolinguistic study. This is interesting as the area falls between the North-South divide which is a frequent focus of linguistic research. Perhaps the East Midlands is hard to locate perceptually and is referred to as ‘neither here nor there’ (Wales, 2000, pp. 7–8) and ‘no-man’s land’ (Montgomery, 2007, p. 352). A study by Braber (2015) shows that even local adolescents find it a difficult area to place in an accent recognition task. Further research focuses on change and whether the region is starting to use more southern linguistic features. Jansen and Braber (2021) show that although the foot/strut vowels are in a process of change, they are not overlapping in the way that these vowels do in southern England. In Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire we see more evidence of foot-fronting, whereas in Derbyshire there are more examples of strut retraction. The second obvious North-South marker is the bath vowel. Research has shown that this is a salient feature of northern English and speakers in the East Midlands are retaining this feature and there appears no northward movement of this isogloss. Other features of the region include yod-dropping, innovative happy and letter vowels which seem to be salient markers of local identity as they are frequently used in commodification of local merchandising. There are also distinctive preposition, pronoun and verbal patterns (for full details see Braber & Robinson, 2018) which speakers frequently use. The West Midlands varieties of English have mainly formed part of perceptual dialectological and attitudinal studies as this variety, and in particular the urban varieties used in Birmingham, generally score very low in attitudinal studies. Similar to the East Midlands, this region can be 471
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seen as a traditional zone, both in phonological and morphological terms (Clark & Asprey, 2013, p. 33). Work concentrates on dialect literature, with Asprey (2020) examining Black Country dialect literature and how literature can be used to determine which dialect features are indexically representative of a region or a group of speakers. Some of the examples from this research seem to suggest that negative verb forms with ablaut and negative forms with [nə], such as dunna, shanna, wunna are still used in dialect literature, as is the third person female singular subject pronoun [ə:] which historically derives from Old English [hēo], such as her’s a lovely girl.
The South of England As in the north of England, there are numerous publications and conferences which focus on the south of England. Wright’s (2018) edited collection bring together studies which focus on historic and current varieties around the south of England. There is significant variation in the south of England and we will look at examples from East Anglia, the South-East and the South-West. Much work on the south of England tends to focus on Estuary English and London’s MLE as well as research on East Anglia (for more details see Jansen & Amos, 2020). In East Anglia, Britain (2020) examines the extent to which dialect levelling is found in the region regarding non-standard marking systems for relative clauses and the extent to which these non-standard forms survive, by examining multiple locations in the region and using several corpora to compare findings. These show that for younger speakers there is considerable dialect levelling and many older, non-traditional forms are disappearing but there are differences throughout the region and not all locations are behaving in the same way. East Anglian English was the first British variety of English to be scrutinised using sociolinguistic techniques (Trudgill, 1974) and almost fifty years later, Trudgill has produced a full-scale study of these varieties (Trudgill, 2021) which examines the phonological, morpho-syntactic, lexical and discourse features as well as the role of East Anglian English in the rest of the world. East Anglian English has also been examined using the findings from the Dialect App (Britain et al., 2020). It records the lexical items ‘splinter’ and ‘snail’ and states to what extent traditional lexis is still used as well as morpho-syntactic features such as third-person present-tense zero. This suggests there is large-scale dialect attrition and traditional dialect forms are being replaced by more widespread national forms. There are also innovations, such as th-fronting and the appearance of intrusive /r/ (realised as /ɹ/) and evidence that certain dialect forms can still be found. Essex has historically been regarded part of East Anglia, but is also considered part of the South-East of England. Research in this region focuses on phonological features, such as Jenny Amos’ and colleagues work on Mersea Island (Amos et al., 2020), which investigates /t/ and /d/ deletion and to what extent following context affects such deletion, with following obstruents least likely to retain such stops. This study suggests that /t/ and /d/ should be treated as separate variables as they do not always behave in identical ways. In East Kent, Hornsby (2018) examines evidence of koinéisation, where previously much research has focused on levelling, supra-localisation and Estuary English, instead focusing on the movement of mining communities from around the country to this rural area, leading to new kinds of variation rather than homogeneity. Although speakers show features which are ‘typically’ south-eastern, they also show features which are more northern and Midlands in origin, such as usage of short front /a/ and unsplit bath-trap, as well as a lack of l-vocalisation and th-fronting which are common in much of the South-East. Other research (Holmes-Elliott, 2015) concentrates on the extent to which features from London are spreading across the South-East, for example th-fronting and a reduction of the variation found in the mouth vowel, as well as goose-fronting. 472
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Holmes-Elliott (2015) suggests that the mouth changes are changes from above, whereas goosefronting is a change from below and that female speakers are at the forefront of such changes. On the other hand, th-fronting, which is a much more stigmatised feature, is a change from below led by male speakers. Work by Cole and Evans (2021) examines the Cockney diaspora in the SouthEast and whether certain ‘typical’ features are moving due to the displacement of Cockney in areas of London by the emergence of MLE and dialect levelling. As well as phonetic investigation, this work also reviews attitudinal changes of male and female speakers from four different age groups, who were either from East London or had parents or grandparents who were from there. It shows that although certain phonetic features of Cockney have moved eastwards with the diaspora, the younger speakers do not self-identify as Cockney as strongly as the older speakers do. However, there is a difference between the male and female younger speakers with a marked difference in the way that older and younger men identify as Cockney but with little differences between the older and younger women. As well as examining migration of speakers from London, there is also significant research taking place in London itself. In London, research has focused on MLE. This variety emerged from the 1980s onwards in areas of London which experienced high amount of immigration. Although it is based on the traditional East End Cockney dialect, there are different sounds and grammatical constructions. There are multiple projects which concentrate on this variety and Fox (2015), illustrating how changes in price and face variables show a new variety of English which appears to have emerged from Bangladeshi groups (mainly the young males) but these changes are also adopted by white Anglo and mixed-race boys and to a lesser extent by white Anglo girls. Research by Cheshire (2020) investigates why similar processes of globalisation, immigration and superdiversity have resulted in different linguistic outcomes in London and Paris, where London has MLE but Paris does not have such a multiethnolect. Cheshire suggests that there are certain conditions which need to be in place for this to arise: the ‘host’ language must be swamped by other languages; no particular language can be dominant and immigration has to be very diverse; language acquisition of this variety is likely to be more spontaneous and children often learn from each other; and finally, this way of speaking needs to be associated with a positive attitudes towards local neighbourhoods, for example, many young people in London identify as Londoners and as living in a socially mixed, multiracial, multiethnic community to which they may feel an attachment and their way of speaking expresses such an identity. In the South-West of England, sociolinguistic work is increasing. Areas of the South-West differ from much of the rest of southern England because of retention of rhoticity which is one of the best-known characteristics of the region and the bath-trap split is variable. Blaxter et al. (2019) examine rhoticity in Bristol and ascertain whether community grammars match individual grammars and suggest that simply examining community grammars may omit variation and complexity within speaker groups. It has been suggested that contact with Southern Standard British English (SSBE) may be causing loss of rhoticity in speakers in the South-West of England. They find that a preceding nurse vowel is always one of the strongest favouring contexts for rhoticity, preceding north/force always has a disfavouring effect and word frequency is always one of the weakest effects, however, they stress there is great variation across speakers. Further work in Bristol (Blaxter & Coates, 2019) detects changes in the bath-trap vowels, where for some speakers the split is increasing, with the difference in length between the two sets growing in order to maintain the (now clearly phonemic) distinction. There is some evidence of length only split between these two lexical sets but there may also be a merger diffusing from northern varieties as well as a length and backness split diffusing from the East. Lexical studies in the South-West focus on Cornwall (Sandow, 2021). This research shows that lexical variation is due not only to age, gender and socioeconomic class, but also with a sense of identify and regional affiliation. A sense of local identity 473
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can be split into ‘Industrial Celt’ and ‘Lifestyle Cornwall’, where speakers can perform different senses of Cornish identity using particular lexical items. Such lexical items, such as croust (lunch), stank (walk) and emmett (tourist), can be used to differentiate from more Standard English varieties and to project a Cornish identity, notably in language usage (see also Sandow & Robinson, 2018). Further work on Cornwall by Dann (2019) examines the production and perception of the bath and trap vowels. Results indicate that lengthened variants in West Cornish English are some of the most salient features of the variety (as they are in many other areas of the South-West). These ‘long ’ vowel sounds are often associated with negative rural stereotypes. Dann’s study finds that the majority of West Cornwall early adolescents retain the fronted bath vowel. However, both trap and fronted variants of bath have significantly shortened to [a] since the Survey of English Dialects. She suggests that these speakers are responding to a desire to maintain regional distinctiveness, while also avoiding using variants associated with rurality, which potentially attract stigma. Further work being carried out on the perception and production in the South-West is by Moore and Montgomery (2018) which focuses on the Isles of Scilly. Research which involved real-time comments on perception of speakers, provides evidence for the distinctive nature of Scillonian English, showing that there are some clear links to Cornish English (for example in bath and trap), but also that there is variation among speakers suggesting competing social types and corresponding pronunciations. This research also shows that content of a speech sample can affect whether people ‘hear’ certain linguistic features that are associated with more rural or more urban styles. Other work (Montgomery & Moore, 2018) examines in detail the cues contained in spontaneous speech which listeners use to map to social stereotypes in the region, allowing examination of which linguistic features are perceived as indexing particular social identities.
Other varieties As well as studies which focus on these different regions of Britain, there are also studies which cover border areas. For example, Accent and Identity on the Scottish/English Border (AISEB) at the University of York combines work on production and attitudinal data of speakers around this border. This research (see also Watt et al., 2014) suggests a link between the ways in which people identify themselves and the linguistic categories they use. The speakers who see themselves as more ‘Scottish’ than ‘British’, use linguistic features more frequently associated with Scottish English. Montgomery (2017) also applies data from the Scottish/English border to carry out draw-a-map tasks with young people on either side of the border to examine their perception of dialect areas in the UK. These findings show that those on the English side label Scottish dialects much less frequently than English ones and the Scottish participants also label more areas within Scotland. This seems to fit with theories of proximity and cultural prominence which feature in perceptual dialectology studies. These findings mirror earlier work on the Welsh border (Montgomery, 2016) which also show that proximity is an important factor in perception and a similar asymmetrical recognition on both sides of the border. Other linguistic varieties include those which form part of British Sign Language (BSL). Schembri et al. (2018) explain that although there is some work on regional variation of BSL, no regional deaf community has been studied in the same depth as in studies of spoken varieties. Studies which focus on syntactic variation or consider stylistic factors are relatively scarce. Other studies focus on lexical variation and work by Rowley and Cormier (2021) investigates this in relation to attitudinal factors. This study finds that BSL signers exhibit high levels of meta-linguistic awareness, being able to discuss different regional variation as well as differences in the extent to which mouthing occurred in different areas of the UK. Furthermore, the researchers believe that such variation in additional to regional variation contributes to the richness of BSL as a language. 474
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Future directions Linguistic research also benefits from new methods of data collection such as the Dialect App and contemporary data sets, for example, the spoken section of the British National Corpus (BNC2014). Brezina et al. (2018) provide early case studies using corpus data and Love (2021) investigates the changing usage of swearing words, including frequency and different usage depending on age, gender and social variables. Such data collection methods have inspired ways of collecting data in times of a global pandemic. The sociolinguistic landscape in Britain is rapidly changing. Factors such as migration, mobility and language contact continue to affect communities. Linguistic consequences of such changes are not always predictable, but sociolinguistic studies can highlight these changes. There are other interesting fields which could not be included in this chapter, including for example the interaction between forensic linguistics and sociolinguistics and issues around accent discrimination (see for example the Accentism Project and Accent Bias Britain websites). This chapter has presented new research, but also detected an unequal distribution of research around Britain, so more work needs to be done on relatively neglected areas as well as other ethnolects and varieties affected by migration and language contact.
References Accent Bias Britain. (2005). https://accentbiasbritain.org/ Accentism Project. (2005). https://accentism.org/ Amos, J., Kastan, J., & Johnson, W. (2020). Reconsidering the variable context. English Today, 36(3), 6–13. Asprey, E. (2020). Black Country dialect and what it can tell us about Black Country dialect. In P. Honeybone & W. Maguire (Eds.), Dialect writing and the north of England (pp. 29–50). Edinburgh University Press. Bailey, G. (2018). Emerging from below the social radar: Incipient evaluation in the North West of England. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(1), 3–28. Blaxter, T., Beeching, K., Coates, R., Murphy, J., & Robinson, E. (2019). Each p[ɚ]rson does it the[ɛ:] way: Rhoticity variation and the community grammar. Language Variation and Change, 31, 1–27. Blaxter, T., & Coates, R. (2019). The bath-trap split in Bristol English. English Language and Linguistics, 24(2), 269–306. Braber, N. (2015). Language perception in the East Midlands of England. English Today, 31(1), 16–26. Braber, N., & Jansen, S. (2018). Sociolinguistics in England. Palgrave Macmillan. Braber, N., & Robinson, J. (2018). East midlands English. Mouton de Gruyter. Brezina, V., Love, R., & Aijmer, K. (2018). Corpus approaches to contemporary British speech: Sociolinguistic studies of the spoken BNC2014. Routledge. Britain, D. (2020). What happened to those relatives from East Anglia? A multilocality analysis of dialect levelling in the relative marker system. In K. Beaman, I. Buchstaller, S. Fox, & J. Walker (Eds.), Advancing socio-grammatical variation and change (pp. 93–114). Routledge. Britain, D., Blaxter, T., & Leeman, A. (2020). Regional variation in East Anglian English based on evidence from a smartphone-based survey. English Today, 36(3), 14–30. Buchstaller, I., Krause, A., Auer, A., & Otte, S. (2017). Levelling across the life-span?: Tracing the face vowel in panel data from the North East of England. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 21(1), 3–33. Buchstaller, I., & Mearns, A. (2018). The effect of economic trajectory and speaker profile on lifespan change: Evidence from stative possessives on Tyneside. In N. Braber & S. Jansen (Eds.), Sociolinguistics in England (pp. 215–241). Palgrave Macmillan. Cheshire, J. (2020). Taking the longer view: Explaining multicultural London English and multicultural Parisian French. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 24(3), 308–327. Clark, U., & Asprey, E. (2013). West midlands English: Birmingham and the black country. Edinburgh University Press. Cole, A., & Evans, B. (2021). Phonetic variation and change in the Cockney diaspora: The role of place, gender and identity. Language in Society, 50(5), 641–665. Corrigan, K. P., Buchstaller, I., Mearns, A., & Moisl, H. (2012). The diachronic electronic corpus of Tyneside English. Newcastle University. https://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte
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41 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN IRELAND Raymond Hickey
Introduction The linguistic landscape of Ireland has always been characterised by the presence of several languages. Cultural, social and political events and scenarios in Ireland have led to the presence of different speech communities whose dominance in the country has arisen and declined throughout the island’s history. In this ever-changing situation the two languages, whose relationship came to be paramount in previous centuries, are Irish and English, both of which are still present. But many more languages have been introduced to the country by immigration in recent years, especially after the accession of several East European countries to the European Union in 2004. This allowed the free movement of citizens of the new member states in the enlarged union, a fact which contributed to the surge of foreign labour into Ireland in the so-called Celtic Tiger years (late 1990s to 2008). The country which contributed most to the swelling population of non-Irish-born people in Ireland was Poland, with others like Lithuania not lagging far behind. Before the financial crisis of 2008, male Poles were largely employed in the then booming construction industry and female Poles worked in service industries. Recent census figures show that now there are approximately 123,000 present in the Republic of Ireland (2016). This means that many Poles are still living in the country and a new, Irish-born, Polish-heritage generation (Diskin & Regan, 2015) is growing up in Ireland which, if not linguistically, will at least culturally leave their mark on Ireland in the coming years. (1) Languages in present-day Ireland (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v)
Irish English, including Ulster Scots in Northern Ireland Several mainland European languages, above all Polish Non-European languages spoken by small ethnic groups Irish Sign Language1 (see Mohr & Leeson, 2023)
The order of the list in (1) reflects the constitutional position of the languages, or their lack of it. Irish is the first language of the nation as specified in the constitution of 1937. English is a second language, in the words of the constitution ‘accepted as a second official language’ (Bunreacht na hÉireann ‘Constitution of Ireland’, Article 8). But in practical terms, Ireland is a completely DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-47 478
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English-speaking country. Those who can speak Irish are also bilingual, with the exception of very few older speakers in the rural Gaeltacht, a collective term for Irish-speaking regions. The Irish successfully transferred their linguistic identity from the Irish language of their forebears to forms of English which they now speak and which are sufficiently distinct from other varieties of the language to function as the bearers of an Irish linguistic identity (see the various contributions in Hickey, 2023). The preceding entry for (1, ii) also has a reference to Ulster Scots (Montgomery & Gregg, 1997). This is a variety of English traditionally spoken in Northern Ireland by people of Scottish descent, especially in the rural regions of the so-called Ulster Scots crescent (Hickey, 2011, p. 298). But in the urban context of Belfast (Milroy, 1978), this variety has been the object of an Ulster Scots revival movement (Hickey, 2011, pp. 311–317) which seeks to increase its ‘otherness’ by maximising the differences between it and more mainstream varieties of English. The languages listed under (iii) and (iv) are not constitutionally recognised in the Republic of Ireland, though the European languages have rights by virtue of their speakers coming from within the European Union. Going on the assumption that not more than half of the 74,000 individuals, who in the 2006 census stated that they used Irish on a daily basis outside education, are native speakers of the language, the 120,000+ Poles in Ireland constitute a group nearly four times greater than that of first-language speakers of Irish. For the present chapter, English in Ireland (both north and south) form the focus. The sociolinguistic situation of Irish is dealt with in the chapter on Celtic languages (see Chapter 42, this volume).
History of English in Ireland The history of Irish English can be divided into two periods. The first period began in the late twelfth century with the arrival of the first English-speaking settlers and finished around 1600, when the second period opened. The main event which justifies this periodisation is the renewed and vigorous planting of English in Ireland at the beginning of the seventeenth century. During the first period the Old English – as this group is called in the Irish context – came increasingly under the influence of the Irish language. The Anglo-Normans, the military leaders during the initial settlement, had been completely absorbed by the Irish by the end of the fifteenth century. The progressive Gaelicisation led the English to attempt planting the Irish countryside in order to reinforce the English presence there. This was by and large a failure, and it was only with James I that successful planting of (Lowland Scottish and English, Robinson, 1994 [1984]) settlers in the north tipped the linguistic balance in favour of English in that part of the country. The south was subject to further plantations along with the banishment of the native Irish to the west during the Cromwellian period, so that by the end of the seventeenth century, Irish was in a weak position from which it was never to recover. During the seventeenth century, new forms of English were brought to Ireland: Scots in the north and West/ North Midland varieties in the south (where there had been a predominantly West/South-West input in the first period). The renewed Anglicisation in the seventeenth century led to the ‘discontinuity hypothesis’, namely the view, that the forms of English from the first period were completely supplanted by the varieties introduced at the beginning of the modern period. However, on the east coast, in Dublin and other locations down to Waterford in the south-east, there is a definite continuation of south-west English features which stem from the imported varieties of the first period.
The modern period The seventeenth century saw a rise in drama in Britain and Ireland, especially after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the extant works of this period providing attestations of early modern Irish 479
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English (Bliss, 1979). By the end of the eighteenth century, drama by Irish writers had gone into marked decline and did not re-generate itself until some of the major figures of the Irish Literary Revival, like Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932) and William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), turned towards this genre at the end of the nineteenth century. This culminated in the linguistic and thematic innovations of John Millington Synge (1871–1909), followed somewhat later by Sean O’Casey (1884–1964) who dealt with themes from lower-class Dublin couched in vernacular language. In prose one finds a number of works in which increasingly a specifically Irish idiom is used. This began with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1801) and continued through the nineteenth century with authors like William Carleton (Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry 1830–33) and Edith Somerville (1858–1949) together with Violet Martin (Ross) (1862–1915) published their Experiences of an Irish RM (1899). In all these works dialect was used for regional flavouring. A certain amount of dialect is found in the work of the early James Joyce (1882–1941), for instance with the maid in the story The Dead from the collection Dubliners. Contemporary literary writing makes use of Irish English features in much the same manner as did the major authors of the early twentieth century. Novelists like Roddy Doyle (1959–) have used a racy vernacular idiom for scenic effect. The more recent novels of the journalist Paul Howard (1971–) portray the snobbish southern Dublin moneyed class via a satirical portrayal of their variety of English.
The language shift The historical relationship of Irish to English, the spread of English or the regional input from England are matters not visible in Irish literature in English. There were no censuses before 1851 which gave data on speakers of Irish and English and no reliable data is available on the language shift, which began in earnest in the early seventeenth century and which had been all but completed by the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the external history of this shift shows what the overall conditions were and allows some general statements in this respect. In rural areas there was little or no education for the native Irish. The Irish appear to have learned English from other Irish who already knew some, perhaps through contact with those urban Irish who were English speakers, especially on the east coast, and through contact with the English planters and their employees. The latter play no recognisable role in the development of Irish English as a separate linguistic group, i.e., there is no planter Irish English, probably because this group was numerically insignificant, despite their importance as a trigger in the language shift process. What one can assume for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in rural Ireland is a functional bilingualism in which the Irish learned some English as adults from their dealings with English speakers, an ability, which by the early nineteenth century, was essential for social advancement in Ireland. The fact that the majority of the Irish acquired English as adults in an unguided manner had consequences for the nature of Irish English and led to much syntactic transfer (Hickey, 2007: Chapter 4). Another point concerning the shift is that it was relatively long, spanning at least three centuries from 1600 to 1900 for most of the country. The scenario for language shift is one where lexical transfer into English is unlikely, or at least unlikely to become established in any nascent supraregional variety of English in Ireland. In some written works, and historically in varieties close to Irish, there were more Irish words and idioms. In phonology and syntax the matter is different. Speakers who learn a language as adults retain the pronunciation of their native language and have difficulty with segments unknown to them. A simple case of this would be the substitution of English dental fricatives by stops (dental or sometimes alveolar, depending on region). In syntax, there are many features which either have a single source in Irish or at least converged with English regional input to produce stable structures 480
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in later Irish English, such as the after perfective, e.g., They’re after leaving the country ‘They have just left the country’. The language shift lasted longest in the west of the country. The east coast had been settled by English speakers in the first period (1200–1600) and English made ground there quickly at the beginning of the second period (1600–the present). In the north of the country, Scottish and northern English settlers determined the nature of the linguistic landscape with the former in the majorty along the coastal crescent of Ulster and the latter predominating in the central regions of the province. This situation resulted in a traditional distribution for forms of Irish English as shown in Figure 41.1.
Figure 41.1 Dialect division in Ireland Source: © Raymond Hickey 2022
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Linguistic identity in Ireland For a country’s population, linguistic identity is manifested in forms of language which are clearly associated with the native population. This identity can survive language shift (Uí Chollatáin, 2016) providing the outcome of the shift is still characterstic of the country in question. In Ireland the shift to English led to varieties of the latter language arising which were sufficiently separate from British English to function as carriers of linguistic identity for the Irish. The movement to English was forced by the British at the beginning of the modern period, but later the necessity of acquiring competence in English became evident to the Irish, not least to be able to find employment at overseas anglophone locations on emigration from Ireland. After the Great Famine (1845– 8) an association of the Irish language with calamity and misfortune was widespread (Doyle, 2015) and added further momentum to the already proceeding language shift. Other factors were also operative here, such as the role of the Catholic Church and the increasing urbanisation of Irish society along with the spread of a modern infrastructure throughout the country, all of which militated against the survival of Irish as a living everyday language.
Identity and supraregional speech The Irish successfully transferred their linguistic identity from the Irish language of their forebears to forms of English which they now speak and which are sufficiently distinct from other varieties of the language for them to function as the bearers of an Irish linguistic identity (Hickey, 2016). This has happened in the context of a variety continuum, both geographical and social in Ireland: it is the supraregional variety of Irish English (Hickey, 2007) which represents the ceiling, in terms of non-local language, and which is still sufficiently different from varieties of British English to act as a carrier of Irish identity. Indeed, the ‘Irish’ nature of this supraregional speech has increased with the exonormative reorientation which set in after Irish independence in the early twentieth century (Hickey, 2020).
Before and after independence The linguistic identity of Irish English would appear to have been affected by independence in 1922 and its aftermath. Audio records of Irish people born in the late nineteenth century show some features which would nowadays be regarded as typically British English, cf. country [kɐntrɪ] (very open STRUT vowel and lack of HAPPY-tensing, Wells, 1982) but it was not completely so, e.g., the recordings show a monophthong for the GOAT vowel (Hickey, 2017). This would imply that Irish English became more Irish in the decades after independence with less exposure to English pronunciation models within Ireland.
Identity and gender By and large the linguistic identity of both genders is similar in that there does not seem to be any linguistic norm in Ireland which is solely the domain of women or men. True, men tend to use more dialectal forms (as elsewhere in Western societies) and women tend to be at the forefront of change so that the new pronunciations of the past two decades or so have appeared and continue to appear in female speech to begin with, e.g., a centralised diphthong in GOAT (Hickey, 2005, p. 90) or a lowered vowel in DRESS; see more on that later in the chapter. But there are further gender-related aspects of language use in Ireland as Murphy (2010) has shown in her discussion 482
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of discourse-level features such as hedges, vague category markers, amplifiers, boosters and taboo language in the age- and gender-differentiated use of Irish English.
The sociolinguistics of modern Irish English There are major forces active in present-day Irish society which are having an impact on language in the country. Essentially, these can be grouped into two: (i) the influx of large numbers of foreign nationals, who are not native speakers of English and (ii) the influence of English from North America (the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada) on the English of young urbanites. Non-English speakers in Ireland need to acquire English to participate in professional and social lives in Ireland, in addition they show a degree of sociolinguistic adaptation to the norms and nuances of Irish English in different parts of the island. Corrigan (2020) has investigated this in detail for non-Irish in south-east Ulster. Diskin (2013), Diskin and Regan (2015) as well as the contributions in Regan et al. (2016) are studies of similar situations in Dublin. Investigating the linguistic integration of immigrants to Ireland is an enterprise which yields insights into language accommodation and adjustment, but the idea that the non-native varieties of English in Ireland have had or are having an effect on the English of native Irish is quite mistaken, no research has shown any conclusive evidence of this. External influence from North America is something for which there are concrete linguistic signs. This external influence does not come from Britain as, for historical reasons, adopting features of British English by native Irish is something which is strictly taboo and would trigger ridicule of those who might do this by fellow Irish people. The North American influence is easiest to recognise on the level of words and phrases. Features such as quotative like as in And he was like, ‘let’s go to my place’, the lack of restrictions on augmentative so, as in That’s so not happening these days or the use you guys as a gender-independent second person plural pronoun as in Are you guys going to the party tonight? are all instances of a clear influence of English from across the Atlantic on Irish English, along with various cases of hyperbolic usage, e.g., awesome, cool, gross, etc. which Irish English now shares with so many varieties of English. The most subtle influence can be seen on the level of pronunciation in (southern) Irish English. Changes here derive initially from Dublin usage. By ‘usage’ is meant here the speech of non-local Dubliners, those who speak with a recognisably Irish English accent but without the defining features of local Dublin English. This variety has been the basis for ‘supraregional Irish English’ (Hickey, 2013) throughout at least the past century and a half. It is subject to continual change, often determined by generation and gender, and many changes in non-local Dublin English usage of the past 25 years or so have now become part of supraregional Irish English and can be found in the speech of younger individuals around the country who do not have an accent typical of their locality. Examples of such features would be a dark l in syllable codas, e.g., deal [diːɫ], the homophony of the formerly distinct /ɔː/ and /oː/ vowels, e.g., horse [hɔːrs] and hoarse [ho:rs], now both [ho:rs] for younger speakers of supraregional Irish English, or the absence of a voiceless labio-velar approximant [ʍ] leading to homophony in word pairs like which and witch, whale and wail, whet and wet, etc.
Recent trends in Irish English In the preceding discussion of changes in non-local Dublin English external influence was not favoured as an explanation. With the present set of changes the opposite seems to be the case. The lowering of short front vowels, which is apparent in the recent speech of young non-local females, 483
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does not appear to be an internal development within Dublin English but an imported feature from North America (USA possibly along with Canada). From a number of investigations in the past two decades it is known that the vowels of the KIT, DRESS and TRAP vowel set are lowered in Canada (see Clarke et al., 1995; Boberg, 2005, 2012), in California (see Kennedy & Grama, 2012) and increasingly in other parts of the United States and the anglophone world in general, e.g., in South Africa and in Australia. This lowering of vowels would appear to have been adopted in Dublin by young females, as part of what is unconsciously perceived as a cool and trendy way of speaking. The lowering is not identical to that found in North America. In particular the KIT vowel is not lowered appreciably (only in the environment of /r-/, e.g., rid [red]) and the DRESS vowel, when it occurs before nasals as in friend, bend, ten, etc., does not show any noticeable lowering, probably due to the tendency for nasals to raise vowels. The greatest lowering is found for the DRESS vowel in pre-sibilant position, e.g., address, best, fresh, yes, etc. with a realisation near [æ]. Those speakers who have this lowering also have a lowering and retraction of the TRAP vowel to a centralised [a] so that the vowels in the two lexical sets are kept distinct. Vowel movements are frequently interpreted (when internally motivated) as triggered by shifts in phonological space which lead to a re-alignment of vowel distinctions. For instance, the short front vowel lowering found in Canada is regarded as connected to the reduction of phonological distinctions in the low back region due to the Don~dawn merger in Canadian English (Boberg, 2012, pp. 174–175). The lowering in Dublin English would seem to only concern the DRESS and TRAP vowels; the LOT and STRUT vowels are, as yet, unaffected by this lowering. In addition, Dublin English, and Irish English in general, does not show any signs of a collapse of the distinction between the LOT and THOUGHT vowels (the Don~dawn merger). Exposure in the media to young female speakers with Short Front Vowel Lowering might be responsible. In Ireland, young female broadcasters, weather forecasters and continuity announcers on Irish national radio and television in general show Short Front Vowel Lowering. And it is also true that on local radio channels throughout the country young female broadcasters are now showing this lowering. But this suggestion would still leave the unanswered question: how did people in the media pick up Short Front Vowel Lowering to begin with? Did some young females speakers go to Canada/USA (California) and pick up the rudiments of Short Front Vowel Lowering there and then plant the seed of this shift back in Dublin with the shift then spreading throughout the city? It is probably too early to say whether Short Front Vowel Lowering will become an established feature of non-local Dublin English and hence of supraregional Irish English. The lowering is not found now (2021) with all young females and it is rare among males. For variation of this kind to become an established instance of language change it would have to apply across the board and occur in the speech of both sexes. Whether this will happen in Dublin remains to be seen.
The enregisterment of Irish English The term ‘enregisterment’ stems from Agha (2003) and refers to a process whereby linguistic features of a variety become associated with its speakers and where a general awareness of these features arises. This awareness can be manifest in journalistic texts, in advertisements, on commercial products, often largely for the tourist industry, such as mugs, T-shirts or postcards. Enregistered features or references can appear on billboards in public places often as puns, e.g., a public advertisement for cider displayed recently in Dublin had the text ‘North Cider or South Cider’ a pun on Northsider/Southsider, a reference to the class and linguistic division of Dublin into a Northern part and a Southern part divided by the River Liffey running through the centre of the city. 484
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Enregisterment is the process by which lay speakers become aware of what features are typical of their native variety and comment on these. Silverstein (2003) distinguishes three levels of indexicality which can be linked up to the development of enregisterment: Level 1 Linguists notice features; Level 2 Speakers notice features; Level 3 Features are overtly commented on in public. In the history of Irish English certain features have been the subject of overt comment (Level 3), e.g., in political cartoons or use in literary representations of Irish speech. A case in point is the PRICE vowel in Irish English. Vernacular Dublin English shows a pronunciation with a central, schwa-like vowel as onset, e.g., tie [təi]. There is historical documentation of this realisation which shows that it was typical of Dublin English in late eighteenth-century Ireland. For instance, Fanny Burney (1752–1840), in her reminiscences of famous individuals she knew, imitates the Irish accent of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) by referring to his pronunciation of kind as [kəɪnd], indicated orthographically as koind. The modern novelist Paul Howard in the Ross O’Carroll novels makes frequent use of the spelling roysh for right, but from the orthography it is not clear whether he intends [rəɪṱ] or [rɑɪṱ]. This situation can be contrasted with the enregisterment of features of Pittsburgh English such as the diphthong flattening found in words like downtown [da:nta:n]. This is unambiguously represented by , i.e., downtown is written dahntahn in representations of Pittburghese, for example on T-shirts, mugs, postcards and the like. Another enregistered feature of Irish English is the unraised realisation of in words like tea, leave, meat, etc. The original vowel in such words is /ɛː/ from Middle English. In vernacular varieties of Irish English this has remained a mid-vowel but in supraregional varieties it is /iː/ as in more standard forms of English. As opposed to the centralised onset of the /ai/ diphthong, unraised /ɛː/ can be indicated by as in tay or crayture. This realisation has been extended to instances of Middle English /eː/ and has a considerable pedigree in Irish English, e.g., Jaysus or daycent, found in the Dublin plays of Sean O’Casey in the early twentieth century. In the realm of grammar there are a number of clearly enregistered features. An obvious instance is youse or yez as a special second person plural pronoun (but not the archaic form ye which serves the same grammatical purpose in supraregional Irish English). Both of these are specifically Irish with the former having spread to many colonies due to significant Irish input in the nineteenth century, e.g., Australia and New Zealand. The vocabulary of Irish English offers a number of clear cases of enregisterment. These can involve a specifically Irish realisation of an English word, as in eejit for idiot, or an English word borrowed into Irish and re-borrowed back into English in an idiomatic sense as in craic for social enjoyment Further examples, from the semantic-pragmatic interface would be gas in the sense ‘fun, ridicule’ or grand as an expression of approval or reassurance (Hickey, 2015, 2017). Finally, one could ask whether enregisterment might lead (i) to the perpetuation of features in a variety, as in the case of unraised /e:/ as in Jaysus, tay, etc., or (ii) to the introduction of features into a variety in the case of supposed traits of varieties. If the latter is true, then enregisterment could become a trigger for language change, i.e., spuriously enregistered features, like orts for arts (in the START vowel in non-local Dublin English), could lead to a genuine instance of language change if speakers begin to use the enregistered features outside the context of stereotyping.
Conclusion The development of English in Ireland, both historically and at the present, is firmly embedded in the social conditions which prevailed and still prevail in the country. Historically, the colonial relationship with England and the language shift were significant factors in the social evolution of Irish English. Today, the global forces of an interconnected world with exposure to many other 485
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varieties of English through the internet, chat forums, social media and the like, are operative in the shaping of Irish English as we move through the twenty-first century. These forces are likely to continue to have an effect on forms of Irish English, especially those closer to the supraregional end of the variety continuum and less on those which maintain a strictly local and/or rural character. How the linguistic identity of Irish English in general will be maintained in the near to mid future is not easy to predict, but if the present situation is an indication of this then the mix of extranational features and the retention of specifically Irish features is likely to persevere and hence serve the purpose of lending a specifically Irish profile to the varieties found on the island of Ireland despite the many internal differences within and between the two political entities Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Note 1 Since the Irish Sign Language Act (2017) it has been the third official language in Ireland after Irish and English.
References Agha, A. (2003). The social life of a cultural value, Language and Communicaton, 23, 231–273. Bliss, A. J. (1979). Spoken English in Ireland 1600–1740. Twenty-seven representative texts assembled and analysed. Cadenus Press. Boberg, C. (2005). The Canadian shift in Montreal, Language Variation and Change, 17(2), 133–154. Boberg, C. (2012). Standard Canadian English. In R. Hickey (Ed.), Standards of English. Codified varieties around the world (pp. 159–178). Cambridge University Press. Clarke, S., Elms, F., & Youssef, A. (1995). The third dialect of English: Some Canadian evidence, Language Variation and Change, 7, 209–228. Corrigan, K. P. (2020). Linguistic communities and migratory processes. Newcomers acquiring sociolinguistic variation in northern Ireland. de Gruyter Mouton. Diskin, C. (2013). Integration and identity: Acquisition of Irish-English by Polish and Chinese migrants in Dublin, Ireland. Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics, 19(1), 67–89. Diskin, C., & Regan, V. (2015). Migratory experience and second language acquisition among Polish and Chinese migrants in Dublin, Ireland. In F. F. Lundell & I. Bartning (Eds.), Cultural migrants and optimal language acquisition. Multilingual Matters. Doyle, A. (2015). A history of the Irish language. From the Norman invasion to independence. Oxford University Press. Hickey, R. (2005). Dublin English. Evolution and change. John Benjamins. Hickey, R. (2007). Irish English. History and present-day forms. Cambridge University Press. Hickey, R. (2011). The dialects of Irish, study of a changing landscape. de Gruyter Mouton. Hickey, R. (2013). Supraregionalisation and dissociation. In J. K. Chambers & N. Schilling (Eds.), Handbook of language variation and change (2nd ed., pp. 537–554). Wiley-Blackwell. Hickey, R. (2015). The pragmatics of Irish English and Irish. In C. Amador-Moreno, K. McCafferty, & E. Vaughan (Eds.), Pragmatic markers in Irish English (pp. 17–36). John Benjamins. Hickey, R. (Ed.). (2016). Sociolinguistics in Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan. Hickey, R. (2017). Early recordings of Irish English. In R. Hickey (Ed.), Listening to the past. Audio records of accents of English (pp. 199–231). Cambridge University Press. Hickey, R. (2020). Adjusting language identity: Twentieth-century shifts in Irish English pronunciation. In R. Hickey & C. P. Amador Moreno (Eds.), Irish identities. Sociolinguistic perspectives (pp. 69–83). de Gruyter Mouton. Hickey, R. (Ed.). (2023). The Oxford handbook of Irish English. Oxford University Press. Kennedy, R., & Grama, J. (2012). Chain shifting and centralization in California vowels: An acoustic analysis, American Speech, 87(1), 39–56. Milroy, J. (1978). Belfast: Change and variation in an urban vernacular. In P. Trudgill (Ed.), Sociolinguistic patterns in British English (pp. 19–36). Edward Arnold.
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42 SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin
Introduction This chapter seeks to give an overview of some of the key sociolinguistic research activity on the Celtic languages since 2008, with particular attention to studies towards the more linguistic end of sociolinguistics rather than the large body of studies on language status, legal, media and educational policies that dominate a lot of the broader sociolinguistic literature focussing on these languages. It is nevertheless impossible to completely separate work on the historical and current political and social status of the languages, the demographics of language ability and their use in society from research on variation, language attitudes, multilingualism and language mixing, ethnicity, language change and shift because all six of the existing Celtic languages are in a minoritised situation and their speakers bilingual or multilingual. The research most frequently contains at least an element of, if not an overarching concern with, existential questions regarding the vitality of the languages in their societies and the future of the languages as spoken and written media. While frameworks of language endangerment, decline and obsolescence have dominated the literature, recent research reveals interest in contemporary speakers, whether they acquired the language in home and community, through education or in adult life. Although concentrating here on work published in English or French, among the salient aspects of the sociolinguistic development of the Celtic languages as mediums of education and research, is that a solid body of sociolinguistic work has been conducted and published in each of the languages. The accessibility of such research, regular contact between speakers and researchers, many of whom belong to the speaker groups, and the wider interest accorded the languages through national and regional policies in a range of fields, means that there is a broad understanding of sociolinguistic topics among many speakers of the Celtic languages which in turn affects research design and objectives and the relationships between researchers and participants.
Sociolinguistic contexts: typology, demographics and speakerness The Celtic languages are a group of Indo-European languages that were once spoken by peoples in large swathes of western and central Europe and probably even further east. Population changes and language and cultural shifts mean that although there may have remained some pockets of DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-48 488
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speakers in other places in Europe, by the end of the era of the Roman Empire in western Europe, Celtic languages were spoken only in Ireland, the Isle of Man and what are now Britain and Brittany, where they continue to be spoken today. Typologically the languages are described as Insular Celtic, distinguishing them from extinct Continental varieties such as Gaulish. Insular Celtic is subdivided into the Gaelic languages (Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx) and the Brittonic group (Welsh, Cornish and Breton). Modern Breton is an Insular Celtic language spoken in continental Europe, its core linguistic elements a result of physical migration from and extensive cultural contact with the other Brittonic peoples from early history. The languages are spoken in their respective countries as well as in diaspora around the world. The Scottish Gaelic-speaking settlements in Canada, in particular Nova Scotia, originating mainly in forced migration from the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the 18th to 19th centuries, and the purposely Welsh-speaking settlement of Y Wladfa founded in Chubut Province in Argentina in the 19th century, are the only geographic areas outside the homelands where intergenerational transmission of Celtic languages in the population group has continued to this day, albeit now quite minoritised, and where the local variety of the languages have been studied and are subject to educational and regeneration initiatives.
The Gaelic languages The Gaelic languages are closely related to each other, the remains of a linguistic continuum similar to the relationship between the Scandinavian languages or between varieties of Occitan and Catalan. However, despite Gaelic Ireland and Scotland’s shared literary heritage leaving their writing systems closely related, the broken nature of the continuum since the gradual marginalisation of the languages in Modernity means that there is little regular contact between everyday speakers of the languages and mutual intelligibility can be challenging except for those who spend some time in the company of speakers of the other language, or in learning it. The study of actual and perceptual linguistic distances between varieties and across the Gaelic languages is an area of active sociolinguistic research.
Irish Estimates of the numbers of speakers of the Celtic languages vary according to the criteria used. In a study using special calculations from 2016 census data for the Republic of Ireland and 2011 census data for Northern Ireland, supplemented with qualitative interviews with parents, teachers and workers from Glór na nGael (a publicly funded organisation that supports Irish speaking families North and South), Seoighe et al. (2021) estimated that there were probably around 7,000 families where Irish was a primary language, home to about 16,000 children in total. Most local participants believed those numbers to be fairly stable over an extended period. With a focus on families with children, the study did not estimate the numbers of other household types where Irish is spoken, which are probably greater in number. Although Irish-speaking families were found in every part of the country, about a quarter of the total were in the designated Gaeltacht areas with further concentrations outside the Gaeltacht in counties which contain a Gaeltacht area, as well as in the cities of Dublin and Cork and their hinterlands. In the North there were clusters in Belfast and some density and growth in Derry, in Newry and South Down and in Tyrone. According to the 2016 Census data, 39.8% of the population of the Republic of Ireland (1,761,420 people over three years old) could speak Irish while only some 73,803 did so on a daily basis outside the education system, and a further 111,473 on a weekly basis. The data is silent on how well the recorded speakers use the language and how they acquired it, but overall figures reflect both the institutionalisation 489
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of the language in the state apparatus and education as well as the relatively small proportion who use the language regularly. Sociolinguistic research on Irish engages across the different contexts in which Irish is spoken. The institutionalisation of Irish in the state differentiates it greatly from the situation in Northern Ireland where the recent 2021 census showed that 12.4% (228,600) claimed an ability in Irish but only 71,900 said they could understand, speak, read and write Irish. A growing area of sociolinguistic research is the study of ‘new speakers’ of Irish (O’Rourke & Walsh, 2021), the trajectories and linguistic habits of regular speakers of the language who were not brought up as speakers. In non-minoritised language situations such speakers’ impact on the language is less remarkable, but in the context of the Celtic languages, their influence on the sociolinguistic dynamic is clearly more consequential. Walsh (2022) is the most up-to-date overview of Irish language policy that will be a standard reference for those seeking to understand the context in which Irish sociolinguistic research is undertaken. The agendas of state agencies, public and voluntary bodies and education have provided the backbone to many recent sociolinguistic projects. Although always having educational issues at its core, An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaíochta (www.cogg.ie/) [the Council for Gaeltacht and Irish-medium Education] has published important sociolinguistic studies in a broad range of fields including language ideologies and perceptions of variation, stances on orthography, the challenges for first-language Irish speakers as early multilinguals, and on many aspects of bilingual education from the perspective of pupils, parents, educators, schools and the institutional structures of the state. Tuismitheoirí na Gaeltachta (www.tuismitheoiri.ie/) is a state-funded association for Gaeltacht parents that has commissioned valuable research on the demographics of Gaeltacht families and perceived challenges for home language transmission and on linguistic topics such as motherese. The research projects and reports from these two agencies are published in open access on their websites. Although broader than sociolinguistics in its scope, the valuable online Bibliography of Irish Linguistics and Literature maintained by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (https:// bill.celt.dias.ie/) records sociolinguistic scholarship on Irish and also on Scottish Gaelic and Manx. Two handbooks of sociolinguistics in Irish (Ó hIfearnáin & Ní Neachtain, 2012; Ó hIfearnáin, 2019) contain essays that use Irish as the core case study while covering language policy, linguistic anthropology, language shift and revival, code-mixing, code-switching and translanguaging, language regard and perceptions of distance between varieties, language and identity, standardisation and topics of specific interest to Irish such as the sociolinguistics of education and of wider interest such as whether Irish-medium education or any other minority language education engenders new fluent, active speakers of the language. Some of the authors of the 2012 volume reworked their contributions in English versions as part of an overview of the sociolinguistics of Irish and English in Ireland (Hickey, 2016), which also contains chapters offering further insights on historical and contemporary sociolinguistic interfaces.
Scottish Gaelic At the time of writing, the latest census data from Scotland are from 2011 (National Records of Scotland, 2015). It reveals 57,600 speakers and a further 23,400 who claim to understand Gaelic but not speak, read or write it. Just 0.5% of adults in Scotland spoke Gaelic at home. More than half the population of na h-Eileanan Siar (the Western Isles) could speak Gaelic, with smaller concentrations in the other islands and coastal Highland regions. The much lesser degree of institutionalisation compared to Irish means that the vast majority of Scottish Gaelic speakers acquired their language in the home or in the community, be they fluent speakers or passive communicators. The need to include the diversity of language competence in the perceived linguistic community has 490
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been a core theme in the work of Dorian (2014), especially since the publication of her seminal study of the sociolinguistics of a variety of Gaelic spoken in northeastern Scotland (Dorian, 1981) that influenced a generation of scholarship in Scottish Gaelic and minoritised languages globally. There is an increasing number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland’s cities both as a result of migration, learners and ‘new speakers’. The complex relationship that adults who attended Gaelic Medium Education (GME) in their youth have to the language has been researched in an ethnography of speaking approach by Stuart Dunmore (2019), while the context for GME and the changing role of Gaelic in contemporary Scotland, assessing shifting ideologies and discourses that have been part of the decline, marginalisation and revitalisation of the language are explored in depth by Wilson McLeod (2020). The potential emergence of education-based varieties of Scottish Gaelic from its embedding as a medium of education is revealed by Nance (2020) in a study of Gaelic-medium education in a traditionally Gaelic speaking area. Notably, it found that initial difference among children who spoke Gaelic fluently before schooling and others were levelled out by late primary school, perhaps pointing to a new common pre-adolescence variety in the peer-group. In a revival setting, Nance and Moran (2022) discuss how young Gaelic-English bilinguals in Glasgow acquire aspects of a traditional dialect, and the extent to which they recognise that their speech is nontraditional but that they nevertheless create a new form of authenticity as Glasgow Gaelic speakers. The collected sociolinguistic ethnography essays of Nova Scotian-based Emily McEwan-Fujita (2020) are an important contribution on sociolinguistics and revitalisation in both Scotland and Canada. Dunmore (2021) highlights in particular how ethnolinguistic identity pays a core part in speaker motivation for Gaelic revival in Nova Scotia while such a stance is much more problematic in language identity and in planning and policy in Scotland. Soillse (www.soillse.ac.uk) is a research collaboration initiative that was originally set up between four Scottish universities to further sociolinguistic research, particularly in language policy, Gaelic in education and Gaelic as a family and community language. It has commissioned and sponsored many studies, which are available online, and provided the starting point for scholarship in family language policy in particular. Among the most controversial publications in our period is Ó Giollagáin, Camshron, Moireach., Ó Curnáin, Caimbeul, MacDonald and Péterváry (2020) The Gaelic Crisis in the Vernacular Community: A Comprehensive Sociolinguistic Survey of Scottish Gaelic. It adopted methodologies from earlier contentious work conducted by some of the authors on Irish. The authors argue that the transmission and social use of Gaelic within families and communities where it was until recently spoken by the majority (termed the ‘vernacular community’) is at the point of total collapse. They propose a model for redevelopment which would be led by a community development trust, but one that has found little traction in the target communities while the research itself has been roundly criticised (e.g., Nance, 2021), leading to sharp exchanges in journals such as Scottish Affairs (2021) 30,2 and 31,1, all of which has somewhat soured Gaelic’s scholarly and popular sociolinguistic environment. Wilson McLeod’s comprehensive and regularly updated bibliography of Scottish Gaelic sociolinguistics and language policy (McLeod, 2022) covers the period since 1980 and is an essential resource for those concerned with sociolinguistic scholarship on the language, arranged by author and theme. More than 70 contributions from 1972 until 2020 by the late Ken MacKinnon testify to his scholarship’s anchor role in language planning and policy debates over half a century.
Manx The interplay of traditional and revival speakers Irish and Scottish Gaelic is complex and we might see all contemporary speakers as somewhere on a continuous scale between those two 491
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imagined speaker-type poles, due to the nature of simultaneous language maintenance and development dynamics in the contemporary sociolinguistic contexts. The situation of Manx Gaelic is different in that the last reputed traditional native speaker died in 1974. Although the revival started in the late 19th century, and there are some families who use Manx at home, the whole language now exists in a revival context (Ó hIfearnáin, 2015). The 2021 census of the Isle of Man shows that 2,223 people claimed an ability to speak, read and/or write the language, a slight increase since 2011, but still a small proportion of a resident population of 84,069. The number of fluent speakers is much smaller, probably only in the low hundreds, made up mainly of language enthusiasts and scholars, adult learners and those who have attended the Manx-medium primary school, Bunscoill Ghaelgach, since its foundation in 2001. The rich complex target varieties envisaged, consciously or not, by speakers and their practices over an extended period have been critically discussed by Lewin (2021). He distinguishes between the various stances, from those who draw as much as possible on the earliest evidence of the spoken language, albeit in a very different sociolinguistic setting in the 18th and 19th centuries, to pan-Gaelicists and revivalists pursuing a purer, if partially reconstructed language. He notes how, for many speakers, the stance is not a monolithic one and that their attitudes vary over time and according to the company of other speakers. Sallabank (2013) analyses the contemporary social and political context for Manx while investigating how the language is becoming more institutionalised and more widely accepted and used in the public space, framing government and popular support as an act of identity. In particular, she remarks that the discourse of language death and the end of traditional Manx is not a feature of the ways in which the Manx people, be they speakers or not, frame the way they talk about the language.
The Brittonic languages Welsh and Breton are linguistically closely related, but not to the extent that cross-linguistic communication is immediately possible. Speakers of Breton and Welsh both claim that learning the other language is a relatively simple feat, at least in the early stages. Cornish, now a revived language, both historically and in its contemporary variety, is closer to Breton. Indeed, linguistic and historical sociolinguistic studies of Breton often include Cornish in their coverage.
Welsh According to the Annual Population Survey (Welsh Government, 2021), there are 892,000 speakers of Welsh (29.5% of the population), and 448,400 reported using it daily, perhaps making it the most widely spoken of the Celtic languages, although the figure includes both those who speak it regularly and others who only speak it at school or indeed infrequently. The highest concentration of speakers is in Gwynedd (75.5%) and Ynys Môn (63.3%) in the northwest, while the largest number of speakers was in the city of Cardiff (101,800) and in Carmarthenshire (93,400) in the southwest. As in the case of Irish and the less marked but similar pattern in the other Celtic languages, the density of speakers in the city reflects the institutionalisation of the language and to an extent, the migration of Welsh speakers from rural areas. Durham and Morris (2016, pp. 3–29) set the sociolinguistics of Welsh in the context of a bilingual country in which the level of bilingualism varies quite widely between geographic communities and the ways Welsh is acquired. They note with Williams (2008, 2013) that Welsh sociolinguistics is also contextualised by a long and very well-organised history of campaigning framed as language rights, emanating primarily from Welsh speakers. This has led to official 492
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recognition and promotion of the language via the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011. Such legislation is seen as public commitment to the vitality of Welsh and the reinforcement of language as an identity marker across the whole of Wales. The function of the Welsh language commissioner set up under the legislation and the role’s impact on the changing Welsh sociolinguistic context is critically discussed and theorised by Mac Giolla Chríost (2016, 2017) and by Williams (2013). In the 1980s and 1990s many sociolinguists followed Balsom (1985) in suggesting that there were three broad categories of Welsh identity linked to language; Y Fro Gymraeg or Welsh-speaking Wales in the north and west where people identified as unambiguously Welsh, Welsh Wales in Abertawe/Swansea and the valleys of the south where there was a clear Welsh identity although majority English-speaking, and British Wales to the east where people primarily identified themselves as British although with a form of Welsh regional identity. The institutionalisation of Welsh across the whole country and the development of Welsh history and culture in the school curriculum have enhanced a sense of Welsh identity, as well as other social and political changes over the last twenty to thirty years, and are at the core of much contemporary research on Welsh sociolinguistics. Geolinguistics and demographic changes have also informed both policy and public perception of Welsh in society. The manner in which a census question can be interpreted by those who complete their questionnaire and what the data collected actually tells us about language ability and use is moot and the data always problematic. The Irish Central Statistics Office have often suggested that the best use of the data is to compare the trends over a longer period than to interpret it in terms of actual language ability and practice (Ó hIfearnáin, 2022). The numbers and locations of speakers of Welsh in Wales have nevertheless been to the fore in language policy and planning research. Jones and Lewis (2019) discuss how perceptions of renewal and stasis have characterised discourse on Welsh but develop a conceptual framework to understand the changing profiles of speakers, their use of language and the impact of governance. They pay particular attention to ways that linguistic maps have played such a key role in language representation in Wales, driving academic, political and public debate, and propose alternative ways to demonstrate multiple geographies of language, in particular promoting an objective of ‘everyday’ language use rather than what they argue is the more loaded, misleading terminology associated with ‘community language’. Community as demography has, of course, been heavily critiqued in sociolinguistics.
Breton There are no regular figures from the French census about the number of Breton speakers, or of the other languages spoken in the state, but the latest in a long series of statistically robust surveys by TMO Région Bretagne (2018), drawn on a sample of 8,162 respondents who were asked about their abilities in Breton and Gallo (the Romance language of Brittany), projected that there were approximately 207,000 speakers (just over 5% of the total population) while a further 125,000 understand Breton very well or fairly well without being able to speak it. The key findings were that the average age of Breton speakers was 70, while the large majority of them live in the rural parts of the ‘traditionally’ Breton speaking area west of a line that runs from around Pempoull/ Paimpol in the north to Gwened/Vannes in the south, ranging from highs of 25% of the population in central western Brittany and 22% in Treger/Tregor to its north, to around 12% to 14% of the population in the most western regions and 7% to 9% in the south. The number of pupils who studied Breton at secondary level in 2020 was 3,805 and 7,293 at primary level, while a total of 19,336 were enrolled in a bilingual school or education programme (Office Public de la Langue Bretonne, 2022). The majority of Breton speakers have acquired their language at home and in their rural community. Depending on how we interpret the Welsh figures, it is possible that Breton is the 493
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Celtic language with the highest number of native or traditional speakers, but also possibly the one that has the smallest proportion of younger speakers. Those younger speakers are in their majority urban second-language speakers, although the numbers who attend Breton-medium schools in the traditionally Breton-speaking areas have recently increased. The perceived gap between the language practices of the older generation and the younger speakers, particularly school learners, and how this is represented and experienced has motivated a body of sociolinguistic research, an overview of which is set out by Hornsby (2015a, 2015b). The authors of volume 223 of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language – Breton: The Postvernacular Challenge (Hornsby & Vigers, 2013) provide a key baseline for contemporary Breton sociolinguistics, both in historical perspective and projections of future research orientations. In particular, they highlight questions of linguistic practice and identity as well as the legitimacy of contested target varieties in society. The core issue is the marked fault in intergenerational transmission, the scale of which differentiates Breton from the other Celtic languages. Le Bihan (2020) focuses on the challenges that Breton faces as a revived language and the role both voluntary and publicly funded organisations have performed since the dramatic decline in intergenerational transmission. He describes how Breton has become much more visible in the public arena this century and appears to many non-Breton speakers to have been de-marginalised, and its legitimacy no longer contested to any major degree by authorities and public opinion, but teases out the lack of language rights in Brittany, which are so much to the fore in Welsh discourse, arguing that any meaningful revernacularisation needs these as a basis for progress. The collected essays of Jean Le Dû and Yves le Berre (2019) bring together thirty years of contributions to Breton sociolinguistic theory. The texts analyse observations on language and society over a long period, but it is in their theoretical discussions that they have had the most impact on Breton and on French-medium sociolinguistics. Their models of the problematic connection between language revivalism and Breton nationalism/separatism on the one hand and an alternative local Breton identity that does not share that view have not been uncontroversial in Breton language scholarship. Built on a perceived separation between the lived experience of traditional speakers and the aims of the revivalists and how the imposition of newly coined norms and standards can marginalise the speakers of local varieties, they developed the sociolinguistic concept of the badume. The word is derived from the Breton e-barz du-mañ (‘in my area’/‘around here’/‘at home’), typically how Le Dû noted traditional speakers explain how they say a word or phrase, as opposed to any literary common norm, or a standard that is, or might be, imposed by authorities as a teachable form of the language. It could be interpreted as a development of diglossia theory, in a loaded linguistic ideological context. The concept was explored in thirty papers from a colloquium on the subject in La Bretagne Linguistique 10 (Le Dû & Le Berre, 1996), a journal which remains one of the main forums for Breton sociolinguistics. Their more recent observations and interpretations, do nevertheless, move towards the recognition of the phenomenon of new or revival speakers of Breton as an area of research.
Cornish There were perhaps 5,000 speakers of Cornish at the start of the 18th century, but it is generally accepted in the sociolinguistic literature that the ongoing language shift that started some centuries before saw the last vernacular speakers living at the end of that century. It is possible that some others may have remembered phrases and had some knowledge of the language into the 19th century (Dunmore, 2020), overlapping with the start of antiquarian and early scholarly interest in the language. Cornish is now spoken as a revived language, a revival which most date from the 494
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publication of Henry Jenner’s 1904 A Handbook of the Cornish Language. The number of fluent speakers of Cornish is generally estimated to number in the hundreds while there are probably several thousand who have some knowledge of the language. Davies-Deacon (2017) summarises how the written corpus of the traditional language, mainly from Middle Cornish (13th–16th centuries) and Late Cornish (17th–18th centuries), is the main source used to reconstruct and develop the language, but that different groups have mobilised these resources in varying ways and have given different weight to the various features of historical Cornish, developing a range of different ideologies regarding its future direction. These differing revived varieties mean that, “users of Cornish do not form a homogeneous mass, but have a range of beliefs about what Cornish should be and how it should be used, not all of which are compatible” (Davies-Deacon, 2017, p. 84). She further explores how these sometimes antagonistic ideologies manifest themselves, particularly through the naming or deliberate misuse of names, pointing out that although some scholars, especially from outside Cornwall, have come to assume that the overall agreement on the Standard Written Form (2008) settled the differences, the disagreements run deeper.
Perceptions of variation and language regard There is a long and robust tradition of descriptive dialect studies in the Celtic Languages which gave rise to authoritative linguistics atlases of regional varieties in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton and numerous monographs on the varieties of particular localities in the mid to late 20th century. Although these works did not overtly have a sociolinguistic approach, their value to historical sociolinguistics has become more evident as researchers glean information from the authors’ field notes on the sociolinguistic settings of their informants and analyse the data they yield on differences between genders and age groups in the same localities. The greater part of early dialectological studies was framed by desire to find the purest form of local speech, untainted by social movement or language contact, that could be constructed as a window to the language as spoken in the past. Very typically speech like that of Chambers and Trudgill’s (1998) NORMS (non-mobile older rural males). Working with elderly informants who were born in the 19th century, the studies have provided linguistic models against which modern dialect studies make valuable sociolinguistic comparison with contemporary usage, highlighting the effects of internal language change, contact phenomena, levelling and innovation, and variation in the current cohort of speakers by age and sex. Hickey (2011) provides an overview of contemporary Irish dialects accompanied by original recordings in interactive maps online, based on original recordings. It offers a solid and innovative analysis of variation and change in modern Irish. Ó Curnáin’s (2007) four-volume study of the Irish of southwest Galway is infused with sociolinguistic observation and analysis. It draws on extensive fieldwork as well as the sound archives from radio and folklore archives. In particular, it identifies strata of speakers within the same area by age cohort, from the older speakers whose Irish is very close to the traditional varieties documented in the past, through an intermediate age group whose Irish is clearly local but with fewer of the distinctive markers, to younger speakers who he believes to be influenced by the contemporary Irish of the schools, media, speech from other regions and by contact with, often dominant, English. Ó Direáin’s (2015) micro-dialectological study of the Irish of the Aran Islands in Galway Bay overtly aims to unite dialectology and sociolinguistics, “on a geographical scale that a dialectologist would consider tiny and includes a range of linguistic features that a sociolinguist would consider far too large and complex to allow for careful investigation”. It is noteworthy that having been published in free open access, the study has led to considerable discussion among the population who provided the data, evidence of how contemporary sociolinguistics can be in a dynamic relationship with participants. The 495
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resultant work details innovation and change over time but also reveals clear influences of age, gender and individual creativity on the patterns of variation (Ó Direáin, 2021). Speakers’ perceptions of variation and its perceived importance from either a value-laden or practical communication perspective, is a growing area of study in the Celtic languages, including the reception of ‘traditional’ and ‘new speaker’ varieties. Ó Murchadha and Flynn (2018) and Ó Murchadha and Kavanagh (2021) investigate student-teachers’ perceptions of variation and the nuanced acceptance of non-traditional speech as a possible legitimate target variety for learners. Coughlan (2021) discusses the ideological tensions around perceptions of linguistic legitimacy among Gaeltacht and non-Gaeltacht speakers of Irish at high school. Ó Murchadha and Ó hIfearnáin (2018) compare the ways that contemporary speakers of Irish negotiate perceptions of ‘legitimate authenticity’ in the language to that of Manx speakers, who reveal various ideological constructions of traditional varieties to justify or challenge their own linguistic choices. McLeod (2017) is an overview of the perception of dialectal diversity in Scottish Gaelic, including a valuable synopsis of the research. He suggests that Gaelic had been depicted in the popular imagination for long as not having a great deal of dialectal variation but that a combination of institutionalisation (especially in broadcasting and education) and continuing language shift to English in areas where traditional Gaelic is spoken, have led to more popular and scholarly concern about the loss of distinctiveness and authenticity. Indeed, speakers of traditional varieties are acutely aware of what observational linguists and educationalists might consider very minor differences in pronunciation or vocabulary. Iosad and Lamb (2020) reinvestigate Linguistic Survey of Scotland (1950–1963) data to challenge frequent assertions describing Gaelic morphosyntax as geographically uniform. Perhaps most importantly for future research, they convincingly argue that their dialectometric findings provide a ‘proof of concept’ that will be theoretically influential in studies of sociolinguistic variation in Gaelic and other languages. Research by Bell et al. (2014), based on thirty-nine focus meetings with 184 Gaelic speakers across Scotland, intended to inform potential corpus planning initiatives, revealed that contemporary speakers believed ‘good’ Gaelic in both informal and formal functions was the way the language was spoken in the mid-20th century (or at least a perception of the way it was spoken by that generation.) The authors described this as an ideology of ‘retro-vernacular attachment’ to the Gaelic of older fluent traditional speakers. Younger speakers were perceived as being influenced by English at the syntactical level, which was more concerning than lexical borrowings. There are relatively few studies on register in the Gaelic languages, and much in the literature to suggest that internal diglossia and social stratification in the languages is limited to the emergence of standard educated varieties used in writing. An important exception is Lamb (2008), a corpus-based analysis of register variation in Scottish Gaelic, mainly in the broadcast media. The perception of there being a linguistic gulf separating speakers of inherited varieties of Breton and the speech of new speakers of a revived Breton variety, néo-breton, has animated a substantial corpus of sociolinguistic literature. Le Pipec (2013) characterises the perception of Breton varieties as being the result of three turns in fortune. The first, a break with the traditional Breton of the mass of the rural population was the creation of a new variety of revived Breton, as far back as the 19th century, conceived as a desire to ‘restore’ Breton to a state of purity, as if never having been in contact with French, and possessed of all registers and vocabulary. The variety is typically portrayed as being practised by second-language speakers in affirmation of their Breton identity, in opposition to French identity. It was further developed in the 20th century and espoused by the Breton-medium school movement and by regionalist politicians, gradually taking the ascendant in the public space. The second break with tradition was the overwhelming cessation in intergenerational transmission between the 1930s and 1960s which saw Breton becoming, for the first time, 496
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the language of only a minority in western Brittany, dropping from perhaps 1.5 million speakers to only a few hundred thousand and now concentrated in the older age groups. The third, the most controversial and most studied in contemporary sociolinguistics, is the replacement of the residual native varieties of Breton by the revived or reconstructed neo-Breton variety. Jouitteau (2019a) reviews briefly a lot of the more recent literature that seeks to counter the idea that revived Breton is a synthetic variety and its speakers all second-language learners. She argues for the importance that sociolinguists, and indeed language planners, understand that there are still cognitively native speakers of Breton in all age groups, in that there are young people who are exposed to a traditional variety of Breton from birth (and before) and who learn Breton at home from at least one of their parents, hear it spoken by their grandparents and in the community. This might be reinforced by learning Breton in a Breton-medium or bilingual school. Her research shows that such people are recognised by their peers and that their own linguistic profiles typically are similar to those of the older generations in that they speak and practise largely only their own local variety, but also know the ‘standard’ Breton of schools and officialdom as well. They may be a minority, perhaps 10% of Breton speakers under forty, but are a constant presence. She notes that nowadays, the younger the Breton speaking parents are, the more they are likely to speak the language with their children. Linguistically she shows that such speakers can be shown to be cognitive native speakers, as opposed to the social and biological concept of native speakerness which is challenged by the ‘new speaker’ literature. Further, she is concerned about their potential erasure both by the discourse of the great rupture with traditional speech and speakers on the one hand and by the ideological construction of their being no different from learners on the other. She considers that sociolinguists should embrace a sociological approach around ‘native new speakers’ who live in the revived language environment but who speak their inherited variety as a first language. The perception that traditional Breton varieties and that of younger Breton speakers who have learnt the language in emersion schooling differ lexically, phonologically and grammatically were investigated by Kennard (2019). The findings were mixed, though contrary to what might have been expected, morphosyntactic and morphophonological did not show significant differences after teenagers had had a long-period of exposure to the language. Nevertheless, Kennard suggests that Breton is undergoing widespread change which might speed up as the older generation goes. Jouitteau (2019b) shows that influences from Standard Breton and even French are not incompatible with native-like properties in the Breton syntax of what she terms the native young adults of the ‘the missing link’ generation. These young speakers can often disregard features of Standard Breton, socially valorised by school and media, for example, in favour of some features of traditional varieties. She does say that the data is not robust enough to test a hypothesis that this generation of school-educated speakers actually share an emerging variety of language with similar syntax to traditional or heritage speakers of a similar age, but further research is called for. The perception of language variation and the ways in which language are acquired or learnt in the home are closely linked, as the Breton examples show. All the Celtic languages are in a minoritised setting where their speakers are almost all bilingual, at least, with the dominant language of the state in which they live. Family language policy has been to the fore in sociolinguistic research and is closely linked to research on early education and also to clinical requirements of native speaker groups. The concern about the place of the native speaker expressed in the Breton case has also been researched in connection to perceptions of language ownership in Irish by Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey (2018), as have the nature of effective acquisition, regarding what level of language can be expected of young bilinguals in the context of their language exposure (Nic Fhlannchadha & Hickey, 2019) and how we might account for intergenerational change in the use of grammatical gender, as an example (Nic Fhlannchadha & Hickey, 2021). 497
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Sociolinguistics in the Celtic languages increasingly reflects many of the major concerns in the discipline globally but is always nuanced by their minoritised position. The effects of institutionalisation through education and officiality as well as concomitant standardisation and prescriptivism are key areas of research. Language mixing, code-switching and translanguaging (a sociolinguistic concept which originated in Welsh; trawsieithu) in all their forms and whether these are evidence of vitality or an existential challenge, are a constant theme.
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43 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN THE FRENCH LANGUAGE AREA Nadine Di Vito
Introduction For centuries merely one of many competing language varieties, by the end of the eighteenth century only a third of the population in France spoke French (Chaurand, 1999). In the nineteenth century its use extended to the upper classes in northern urban areas and eventually acquired the social perception of being widespread (Lodge, 1993). Use of French continued to increase, first in the upper classes as a vehicle for sociopolitical advancement and, then, with increasing mobility and access to educational institutions, in the middle and lower classes. In Belgium, French has competed with other languages since the Middle Ages, and currently shares official status there with Dutch and German. While the dominant language only in the southern area of Belgium, French is considered the preferred language of business and the lingua franca in Brussels, and over 95% of Belgians self-report as speaking French well or very well (Janssens, 2008). As the French language was founded in sociocultural and sociolinguistic diversity in both countries, so today it remains a vibrant reflection of the multifaceted life of its speakers.
Lexicon The evolution of everyday realities and changing attitudes in any speech community leave traces in the words they use. Perhaps the most visible domain of social influence on a language’s lexicon is its borrowings, which continues to provoke intense debate in France. It is common knowledge that borrowings are the result of intercultural contact, of which France has been the site over many years, from conflictual to collaborative. According to various researchers (e.g., Désirat & Hordé, 1988; Walter, 2000), Gallic terms related to rural life (e.g., alouette – lark) and Frankish military terms (e.g., guerre – war) entered the language in the twelfth century, followed in the thirteenth century (through cultural contact during the Crusades) by Arabic terms related to commercial life and mathematics, such as orange and chiffre (number). Beginning with the first wars with Italy in the late fifteenth century and continuing through its renaissance period, French welcomed numerous Italian terms (e.g., capitaine), including -o, -i, -on, and -esse words (e.g., piano, spaghetti, violon, politesse). Spanish contributed military and literary terms (e.g., adjudant), and German added hundreds of terms related to military life (e.g., boulevard < Bollwerk 501
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-49
Nadine Di Vito
– bulwark), personality descriptors (e.g., franc – frank), nature (e.g., bois – wood), wildlife (e.g., chouette – owl), and science (e.g., quartz). By the early nineteenth century, enthusiasm for British commerce, politics, daily life, sports, and industry resulted in borrowings in all those domains (e.g., importer, budget, bifteck, football, ballast). Interactions in commercial and maritime affairs added hundreds of terms with Dutch and Flemish origins (e.g., boulanger – baker), and French also embraced terms from central and eastern European languages (e.g., Russian: cosaque; Hungarian: sabre; Czech: pistolet; Polish: meringue; Turkish: gilet – waistcoat) and some words from northern European languages (e.g., Norwegian: ski; Icelandic: geyser; Finnish: sauna; Danish: lump – lumpfish). In addition to sociocultural influences from outside the mainland, the influence of regional varieties is noteworthy. A land-based language, French developed a maritime vocabulary with help from Picard (e.g., bateau – boat), Normand (e.g., matelot – sailor), and Provençal (e.g., cigale – swan), from which more than 700 words can be attributed, including many -ade words (e.g., ballade). Other terms are attributed to Breton (dolmen), Franco-Provençal (avalanche), Wallon (houille – coal), Alsatian (quiche), Béarnais (béret), Gascon (barrique – barrel, cask), and Cevennes (airelle – blueberry). Also during the Renaissance, a rise in the symbolic value of intellectual pursuits resulted in new borrowings from Latin and Greek. At times, an existing Latin-based term was re-borrowed from Latin, resulting in doublets. French has thus been consistently open to linguistic enrichment since the earliest times, having taken words from more than 150 languages and dialects (Walter, 2000). Here, then, is the linguistic backdrop against which to interpret the efforts of French governmental institutions to prevent borrowings from English. French and English have added to each other’s lexicon for centuries, with French welcoming English borrowings in the domain of politics (e.g., parlement), sports (e.g., football), leisure (e.g., flirt), the arts (e.g., show business), aviation and space (e.g., aéroport; – naute words such as astronaute), fashion (e.g., cardigan), and technology (e.g., déboguer < debug). It is only in the 1930s, however, that French borrowings from English first exceeded its contributions. Spikes of American influence are evident in the overall flow of lexical borrowings, such as cinema-related terms in the 1920s (e.g., screengirl) and economic-related terms in the 1960s (e.g., marketing). By then the French government had decided to aggressively promote French and attempt to curb English borrowings. Judge’s (1993) detailed examination of French governmental intervention highlights some of the principal groups, political decrees, and initiatives aimed at preserving French. A chronological summary of these efforts is presented next, followed by a discussion of their success. 1966 De Gaulle establishes the Haut Comité de défense et d’expansion de la langue française, whose goal, like that of the Académie française, is to establish the terminological purity of French. 1971 The Banque des Mots, published by the Conseil international de la langue française, is launched to disseminate research and recommendations regarding technical and scientific terminology. 1975 (May) The Association française de terminologie is created to help administrative and commercial enterprises collaborate on terminological issues. The Haut Comité then replaces this group with FRANTERM to coordinate various commissions. (Dec) The BasLauriol law is enacted to enforce government decrees regarding terminology. French is compulsory in all government, business, and educational spheres. Use of a non-French word when a French equivalent exists can result in fines.
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1983 The Minister of Communication recommends approximately 100 terms to replace AngloSaxon terms in advertising and technology. 1984 The Haut Comité is replaced by the Comité consultatif de la langue française, which produces a circular of approved feminine-marked profession names (1986), and the Commissariat général de la langue française, charged to protect French from outside linguistic influence and to oversee the development of specialized lexicons and neologisms. FRANTERM publishes the first Dictionnaire des néologismes officiels. 1986 All government ministries have their own commissions responsible for controlling domainspecific terminology. 1988 Commissions ministérielles de terminologie (CMT) have by now issued approximately 30 decrees regulating terminology in numerous domains (e.g., tourism, sports, telecommunications). 1989 The two 1984 groups are replaced by groups with greater directive authority: (1) Délégation générale à la langue française, whose mandate is to actively promote the French language, and (2) Conseil supérieur de la langue française, whose mandate includes designating “le bon usage”. Regional languages are no longer explicitly promoted. 1994 The Loi Toubon is enacted, requiring the use of French in all commercial materials. Although governmentally sponsored terms have prevailed in particular cases (e.g., ordinateur over computer), French efforts to replace Anglo-Saxon words with French-based terms have been limited at best. The English – ing suffix continues to proliferate, even when French-based equivalents exist (e.g., le casting over la distribution artistique). This expansion has sometimes resulted in meanings unfamiliar to an Anglophone (e.g., un bowling – bowling or a bowling alley, un pressing – steam pressing or a dry cleaner). Finally, some French – ing neologisms are merely English-sounding (e.g., un lifting – a face-lift, un smoking – a tuxedo, un brushing – a blow-dry). Nevertheless, some French-based suffixes have gained public acceptance. The suffix – iel has produced numerous neologisms (e.g., logiciel – software). The French-based informatique, with the – tique suffix, has won over computer science. Other productive French-based suffixes include – thèque (e.g., médiathèque – multimedia library) and – man, which evokes an Anglo-Saxon feel (e.g., tennisman – tennis player). Audureau (2019) notes that over half of the 410 new words added to the Larousse and Petit Robert dictionaries in 2017–2019 are French-based, with the majority representing semantic extensions, followed by borrowings from other francophone areas, and then regional terms. Almost 40% of dictionary additions are from other languages, with North American English the dominant contributor, especially in the domains of technology (e.g., open source), society (e.g., post-vérité), leisure (e.g., spoiler), and the economy (e.g., startuper). Numerous new entries in the 2022 editions of the Larousse and Petit Robert were related to the pandemic (e.g., déconfiner), technology (e.g., vlog), and societal changes (e.g., mocktail) (Campese, 2021). Certain lexical and morphological innovations are more prevalent among younger speakers. Suffixes marking contemporary youth discourse include – os (e.g., tristos – sad) and – oche (e.g., sac en plastoche – plastic bag). Governmental concern over the propensity of younger speakers to favor English-based neologisms prompted an online competition (Francomot), where students who found the best French-based replacements for commonly used English words received prizes (Prasad, 2010). Nevertheless, a recent study of French attitudes found that a majority of speakers find anglicisms a practical means to address lexical needs, especially in the area of technical or specialized vocabulary (Walsh, 2016). Additionally, younger respondents were less concerned
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than older respondents that new terms be based in the French language. Finally, over 60% of all respondents stated that one could be French without speaking French, highlighting the complex nature of cultural identity. Lexical variants oftentimes correlate with register and stylistic choice whereas dialectal forms associated with rural France have become socioeconomic and identity markers (Blanchet & Armstrong, 2006), even among young speakers. Barbu et al. (2014), for example, found that adolescent boys in rural Haute-Savoie use the Francoprovençal y pronoun as an identity marker with their long-term native speaker friends. In Belgium, the corpus-based Dictionnaire des belgicismes (Francard, 2010) offers a window into the complex origins of many French neologisms. As in France, Belgian French has welcomed English terms, but neologisms common in Brussels and Wallonia are frequently calques on Dutch (French brosser < Dutch brossen – to skip a class) or reflect numerous linguistic influences and have origins that are difficult to pinpoint with certainty (Francard, 2010).
Tu and vous Use of address forms in spoken discourse continues to follow longstanding patterns, with tu the preferred pronoun with family, friends, and younger people, and vous when addressing strangers or someone older or perceived of higher status (Warren, 2006). Kern (2020) notes, however, that domains of tu use have been steadily gaining ground. Even in the workplace, superiors increasingly ask subordinates to be addressed with tu, suggesting its use as a marker of collegiality, even if men in the workplace report participating more in reciprocal use of tu than women. In addition to finding an increasing use of tu, Hughson (2001) notes age-based differences in its social significance, with younger students in a suburban school in Paris using tu as a marker of solidarity and older speakers using tu more as a marker of intimacy.
Gender and inclusive language Although gender marking in French sometimes corresponds to biological gender, oftentimes it does not (e.g., un éléphant femelle – a female elephant, une souris mâle – a male mouse). Gender in French can also depend on whether the noun is singular or plural (e.g., un bel amour [m.] – a beautiful love, d’ardentes amours [f.] – ardent loves) and even on syntactic factors (e.g., des gens patients [m.] – patient people, de vieilles gens [f.] – old people). Some French words have no feminine form (e.g., un gourmet), some no masculine form (e.g., une victime), and others have gained or lost one or the other gender marking over time (e.g., papesse [f.] – female pope). Trudeau (1988) traces the sociohistorical evolution of French gender marking for professions, noting that for centuries profession names were marked for both genders even if women were not actively engaged in those professions (e.g., jugesse [f.] – female judge). During the Renaissance and Classical periods, the feminization of profession names flourished, but as gender-based job specialization developed, certain markings either died out or gained new meanings (e.g., ambassadrice [f.] – wife of the ambassador). This practice extended to the adjectivization of nouns, as in Zola’s mention of la Maheude (the wife of Maheu). As more women entered historically male professions in the early twentieth century, feminine gender marking proliferated (e.g., avocate [f.] – female lawyer). With the first feminist wave in France (1920–60), however, came gender marking battles. Feminists challenged the traditional notion of “femininity”, rejecting terms such as docteresse [f.] (female doctor) and finding the male marked form more progressive. Public controversy over gender assignment rules continued and 504
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feminist opinion swung back toward feminine marking. With the passage of the equal rights law in 1983 came a renewed consciousness of the relationship between gender marking and social perception. Yvette Roudy, Minister of Women’s Rights, argued that restrictions in gender marking precluded women from accessing positions where only masculine marking existed (e.g., un ingénieur [m.] – [m./f.] an engineer) and spearheaded efforts to eliminate gender-based inequalities. The Roudy Commission, comprising representatives of various governmental ministries and the Académie Française as well as sociologists and linguists, conducted public opinion surveys that showed resistance to feminization noteworthy in professions that had excluded women until recently (e.g., medicine, law, military, business). The commission rejected using femme + noun (e.g., femme médecin – woman doctor), Madame le + noun (e.g., Madame le professeur – Madam Professor [m.]), and the -esse/-oresse suffix, recommending instead phonetic and morphological mechanisms already productive in the language: - --ier -> --ière (une pompière [f.] -- a female firefighter) - --ien -> --ienne (une chirurgienne [f.] -- a female surgeon) - --eur -> --euse (une chercheuse [f.] -- a female researcher) - final consonant -> --e (une sculpteure [f.] -- a female sculptor) The official resurgence of the feminization of profession names was thus launched, with some markings (e.g., - trice ending: institutrice [f.] – female elementary school teacher) meeting with greater acceptance than others (e.g., – eure ending: auteure [f.] – female author). In 1997, female ministers of Jospin’s cabinet refused to be called Madame le ministre, resulting in a joint meeting of the more conservative COGETER (General Commission of terminology and neologism) and the more progressive INALF (National Institute of the French Language). The INALF sponsored an official feminization guide in 1999. Activism for the feminization of French terms has expanded in the recent past to include the larger issue of gender equality. The movement to adopt inclusive language has grown exponentially since 2015, when a few noteworthy publications promoting inclusive language sparked numerous public debates and articles. Samaran et al. (2018) constructed a detailed timeline of the pivotal events in the growing debate. The following timeline expands on their chronology, showing how divided politicians, linguists, media figures, and publishers are on this issue, and also how steady technological advancements are facilitating the spread of inclusive language despite political and social headwinds: 2015 Nov 18 Government agency Haut Conseil à l’Égalité publishes an inclusive language guide. There are 250,000 downloads within the first year. 2016 Sept 11 Mots-Clés publishes a guide for using inclusive language. 2017 Sept 23 Hatier publishes a CE2 (3rd grade) textbook incorporating inclusive language. Sept 26 Europe 1 media personality Raphaël Enthoven criticizes the use of inclusive language. Oct 10 Muriel Pénicaud, Labor Minister, recommends a guide for inclusive writing for businesses. 505
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Oct 16 Oct 17
Jean-Michel Blanquer, Education Minister, speaks out against inclusive writing. L’ANFOR, the French Association of Normalization, designs a French keyboard with the gender-inclusive middot (e.g., tou·te·s). Oct 26 The Académie française publishes Déclaration de l’Académie française sur l’écriture dite “inclusive”, which vehemently opposes inclusive writing. Oct 27 Françoise Nyssen, Culture Minister, speaks out against inclusive language. Oct 27 WORD integrates inclusive language in its spellcheck options. Nov 7 SLATE adopts inclusive language and publishes a pro-inclusive language manifesto signed by over 300 educators. Nov 10 Other educators write a petition in opposition to SLATE. Nov 21 Édouard Philippe, Prime Minister, bans the use of inclusive language in all government documents. 2018 May 14 Le Robert includes the expression écriture inclusive. 2019 June
Mots-clés publishes Gender-inclusive Language in France: A manual.
2020 Sept 18 Over 30 linguists denounce the use of inclusive language. 2021 May 5
Jean-Michel Blanquer bans inclusive language in public schools, including the middot and the gender-neutral personal pronoun iel, arguing that such innovations are an obstacle to language learning. Sept Google and Mots-clés collaborate to examine inclusive language searches (Birr, 2022). They discover that “écriture inclusive” searches rose 180% in France between 2020 and 2021. Their online survey (N=8189, 18 years and older) finds that 40% of internet users know the term écriture inclusive. Of them, 58% have an unfavorable opinion and only 16% a favorable opinion. 61% reject the middot, and 79% reject neologisms that combine genders (e.g., lecteurices). However, 65% favor the feminization of nouns (e.g., autrice) and 56% favor global terms (e.g., la direction instead of les directeurs). Overall, younger respondents are more favorable to inclusive language, and 30% of women aged 18–24 are in favor of it (or twice the general average). Oct Le Robert includes the pronoun iel (iels, ielle, ielles). Nov 16 François Jolivet, member of Parliament, claims that Le Robert is too “woke” and asks the Académie française to weigh in (The Guardian, 2021). Nov 16 Jean-Michel Blanquer, Education Minister, agrees with Jolivet and claims that schoolage children should consider the iel dictionary entry to be invalid and unacceptable. Nov 17 Charles Bimbenet, general editor of Le Robert, justifies inclusion of iel as a form both growing in frequency and requiring explanation. 2022 Jan 26
Le Figaro interviews the major presidential candidates on their position regarding inclusive language. Emmanuel Macron is described as being on both sides of the issue. While he does not use the progressive middot in writing, he does use inclusive 506
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spoken language forms (e.g., toutes et tous, présidente), even if not consistently (Michalik, 2022). Éditions Le Manuscrit publishes a volume on non-binary language use in French (Swamy & Mackenzie, 2022), advancing the discussion of gender-neutral language.
In contrast with France, the Belgian government has strongly advocated for inclusive language and updated its civil code with more inclusive language, replacing in some sections highly paternalistic language with gender-neutral phrasing (“good house father” > “prudent and reasonable person”) (The Brussels Times, 2021). The Belgian government has also actively encouraged all employees to move toward inclusive language in both written and spoken communication and has provided them with a 20-page document that outlines ways to promote inclusive language (Demonty, 2022).
Grammar Spoken-written French distinction Corpus-based studies of French have shown that, contrary to popular belief, the spoken-written distinction is oftentimes less important to a speaker’s choice of grammatical structure than the social context and nature of the discourse, particularly the degree of planning and formality. This is the case with use of participial clauses (Havu, 2017) and isomorphic correlative structures such as soit . . . soit . . ., ni . . . ni . . ., plus . . . plus . . ., and autant . . . autant (Roig, 2017). Nevertheless, some fundamental differences in spoken and written French do exist. For example, approaches for disambiguating the multiple semantic values of aussi and si depend primarily on the spoken or written mode (Hadermann, 2017). Additionally, Gadet (2017) argues that, unlike written discourse, the inherently interactive nature of conversational speech promotes discourse strategies that can be grouped under the notion of proximité.
‘Ne’ deletion The spoken-written distinction is also paramount with respect to use of the negative particle ne, whose steady decline in spoken French across age groups, discourse types, grammatical and phonological contexts, and regions has been amply documented (Armstrong & Smith, 2002; Ashby, 1981, 2001; Hansen & Malderez, 2004), with near categorical elimination of ne noted in casual conversation among French youth (e.g., Armstrong, 2002). Consequently, more recent research is centering on why speakers might retain ne, with the following factors shown as favoring ne retention regardless of the region or speaker profile (Armstrong, 2002; Meisner et al., 2010; Meisner & Pomino, 2014; van Compernolle, 2009): • greater discourse formality and topic seriousness are associated with higher frequency of subject nouns and slower speech, which independently and together correlate with ne retention, • emphatic speech, • low frequency noun subjects and emphatic pronouns. Studies of the negative particle ne in electronic chat rooms show a trajectory of ne deletion similar to that found in spoken discourse (Blattner & Williams, 2011; van Compernolle, 2008; Williams, 2009). As in spoken discourse, ne is frequently absent in unmoderated chats, with the speaker’s age, the nature and frequency of the subject pronoun, and discourse markedness significant to its retention or deletion. 507
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Indirect interrogatives Far from reinforcing the notion that spoken French is primarily non-standard, Lefeuvre and RossiGensane (2017, p. 71) indicate that 90% of spoken French indirect interrogatives follow the standard norm, with a significant number (both standard and non-standard) similar in structure to independent clauses. While infrequent among the general population, non-standard in situ embedded interrogatives (e.g., Je sais pas il a dit quoi) are common in urban youth vernaculars in Paris (Gardner-Chloros & Secova, 2018; Cheshire & Gardner-Chloros, 2018) and Strasbourg (Marchessou, 2018), with one attitudinal study indicating that young multiethnic vernacular speakers even reject the standard equivalents in favor of such non-standard structures (Secova et al., 2018, p. 252). Gardner-Chloros and Secova (2018) posit that in situ indirect interrogatives are perhaps a change from below, spearheaded by young males of immigrant descent with dense multiethnic social networks, noting potential internal pragmatic factors and external linguistic factors at play (pp. 199–200).
Dislocation Studies of dislocation in spoken French reinforce previous research indicating subject dislocations to be the most prevalent (94%), with dislocations more frequent in interactive, spontaneous discourse, and planned, formal speech favoring left dislocations (73% in mealtime conversations compared with 95,9% in conference speech) (Raickovic & Skrovec, 2020). Dislocated noun phrases with the co-referent pronoun ça are found in both spoken and written corpora (Linares, 2019), again challenging the notion of a strict divide between spoken and written French.
Relative clauses Discourse factors significantly influence relative clause use, with their frequency linked to increased context formality and planning in several studies (Larrivée & Skrovec, 2016, 2019; Larrivée, 2020; Raickovic & Skrovec, 2020). As overall frequencies rise, so do the percentage of subject relatives and the diversity of relative structures. Register differences can be described as a continuum, with the accessibility hierarchy maintained within discourse genres (qui > que > où > dont > quel x > quoi) and higher accessibility linked to lower performance errors (Larrivée & Skrovec, 2016).
Pronunciation Vowel contrasts Numerous researchers have documented considerable variation and reductions in mid-vowel contrasts in spoken French, with some maintaining that the distinctions between the mid-vowels /e/ and /ɛ/, /o/ and /ɔ/, and /œ/ and /ø/) can be neutralized in unstressed position (Armstrong, 2001; Wioland, 2005). In a recent study of TV and radio personality speakers (generally considered models of standard French pronunciation) in guided interviews, text readings, and lists of minimal pairs, Chalier (2021) examined the production and perception of mid-vowel contrasts in French as well as contrasts between the nasals /œ̃/ and /ɛ/̃ , finding a general movement toward neutralization of vowel contrasts, especially among younger speakers: patte /ɑ/ and pâte /a/ While 65% of the speakers continue to maintain a difference in posteriority and duration in minimal pairs, these distinctions are decreasing in interactive speech, and 20% of the (primarily young) speakers neutralize the vowel in favor of /a/. 508
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jeûne /ø/ and jeune /œ/ Even if 95% of the speakers pronounce these vowels differently in minimal pairs, only 55% distinguish them in text readings, indicating an evolution toward a more open vowel /œ/ in closed syllables. et, épée, été /e/ and est, épais, était /ɛ/ Two-thirds of the speakers neutralize the vowels in minimal pairs, with movement toward the closed vowel /e/ in open syllables. un /œ̃/ and brun /ɛ/̃ Although the maintenance of four, five, and even six nasal vowels can still be heard in some regions of France, the merger of (in) /ɛ/̃ and (un) /œ̃/ is largely complete in Parisian speech. Only 7/20 speakers in Chalier’s corpus, all of them older, maintained the nasal vowel /œ̃/ when reading minimal pairs, and 98% of all examples of un in the text reading task were pronounced /ɛ/̃ . In contrast with increased vowel neutralizations in France, mid-vowel height distinctions are generally maintained in Belgian French, especially by speakers from industrial working class areas. Nevertheless, younger speakers and speakers closer to the French border tend to neutralize mid-vowel contrasts, and approximately half of those speakers recorded in three different areas of Belgium neutralize /œ̃/ and /ɛ/̃ in the words brun and brin, except when read as a minimal pair (Hambye & Simon, 2009, 2012; Hambye et al., 2016).
Schwa A distinguishing characteristic of French speakers in southern France is the tendency to realize schwa in all contexts except when it precedes or follows another vowel. Schwa usage has recently been examined in several northern and southern French locations (some metropolitan and some rural) (Durand, 2014; Lyche, 2016). In all southern varieties, clitics and word-initial position are the most stable contexts for schwa retention (except for particular lexical items, such as je and petit). The most advanced context for schwa deletion is word-final position, with speakers under 40 years old in metropolitan areas leading the change. The formality of the discourse is also a significant factor, with higher schwa deletion in unmonitored casual speech and formal speech favoring schwa retention. In all northern locations, schwa deletion is more advanced, again especially among younger speakers in unmonitored conversation, and is constrained by the same linguistic factors that affect schwa deletion or retention in the southern varieties. Schwa usage in Belgian French is similar to that in northern France, except with respect to word-final consonant clusters, which are oftentimes reduced in conversational discourse as opposed to everyday Parisian discourse where only the schwa is typically eliminated (Hambye & Simon, 2009).
Postconsonantal (r) and (l) The deletion of postconsonantal (r) and (l) (e.g., gen(re), capab(le)) is attested as early as the fifteenth century (Lodge, 2004), and by the eighteenth century, deletion was standard. With the frequent loss of word-final mute (e), words such as capre (caper) were reduced often enough to create doublets (cape – cloak). In the nineteenth century, orthography helped reinstate pronunciation of 509
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postconsonantal (r) and (l) in the upper classes, and eventually such reductions became identified with popular Parisian speech and thereby poor or corrupted speech (Boughton, 2015). Attested now in all social classes throughout France, deletion correlates with particular high-frequency lexical items (e.g., aut(re) – other), informal contexts, and faster speech. Rhythmic and phonological factors also favor deletion, such as phrase-final or post-nasal position (e.g., j’en ai quat(re) -- I have 4; comprend(re) – to understand). The perception of postconsonantal (r) or (l) reduction as stigmatized or simply casual speech depends on the linguistic context, lexical frequency, and situational formality (Léon & Léon, 1997). Additionally, younger speakers delete more than older speakers, and although older women tend to be more conservative than men, in certain linguistic contexts younger women appear to be at the forefront of this change (Ayres-Bennett, 1990).
Liaison While research over the past 100 years indicates overall stability of obligatory liaison, numerous recent studies have shown a steady decrease in optional liaison. In one large corpus-based study of liaison use by political personalities, age and gender are significant factors in the decrease of optional liaison, with younger female speakers leading the change, and non-linked liaison losing its importance as a stylistic or social class marker (Laks, 2014). However, in another study of the everyday discourse of public speakers across a 40-year period, social class is seen to correlate with decreasing optional liaison (Dugua & Baude, 2017). Liaison has also been examined in the top French song hits from 1956 to 2017, indicating stable maintenance of obligatory liaison across the years but a continual decrease in optional liaison from 51% to 18% (Coutanson & Badin, 2021). Finally, Laks and Peuvergne (2017) and Hornsby (2020) compare numerous corpus-based studies of liaison, noting consistent maintenance of obligatory liaison but an ineluctable reduction in variable liaison over the years, with age, gender, degree of discourse spontaneity, grammatical context, and particular lexical item all significant factors in liaison realization. Variation in liaison use has also been studied in regional French varieties and in Belgian French. Hambye and Simon’s 2009 study of liaison in three different areas of Belgium and Hornsby’s 2020 comparison of various studies of liaison, including adolescents in four francophone cities (The Four Cities Project), three in France (Lille, Perpignan, and Strasbourg) and one in Belgium (Mons), all indicate lower frequency of liaison in more casual discourse, although women in The Four Cities study are more conservative than men, producing more optional liaison than men in all four cities and in both reading and interview contexts.
Pauses, prosody, and pitch A corpus-based study of French, Belgian, and Swiss native speakers of French across 14 different speech contexts indicates that almost 80% of spoken discourse pauses are grammatically conditioned, with a strong correlation between the average length of a pause and the degree of the syntactic border (Grosman et al., 2018), reinforcing earlier research findings (Goldman et al., 2010). Isolated pauses are predominantly found in the most planned speech genres (e.g., news reports, homilies). In a recent study of Parisian urban youth pronunciation and prosody, Fagyal and Torgersen (2018) found that the most prolific speakers and storytellers of immigrant descent were those who produced the most variations in vocalic intervals and used the most vernacular features (e.g., a variety of R allophones, palatalization of word-initial dental and velar stops). Similar prosodic features and innovative palatalization have been noted in youth vernaculars in both France and Belgium 510
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(Hambye & Simon, 2009, p. 124; Kasstan, 2019, pp. 712–713), suggesting a complex interplay of linguistic, discourse, geographic, and sociocultural factors in multiethnic urban youth speech.
Orthography With the approval of the Académie française, in 1990 the Conseil supérieur de la langue française proposed the simplification of approximately 2,400 words (Rectifications de l’orthographe), which involved the regularization of plurals, compound nouns, and idiosyncratic spellings, as well as the elimination of the circumflex accent when not bearing semantic meaning. Public schools adopted these recommendations in 2008 and some editors followed suit; nevertheless, inasmuch as these recommendations were merely guidelines, there was no consensus on the exact list of words to be included in the simplification, with dictionaries incorporating certain reformed spellings but not others, and an outcry by the general public over the proposed changes regarding a few high-frequency words (e.g., ognon, nénufar). Current official recommendations are to accept both old and reformed spellings as long as the writer uses one or the other consistently within the document (Nadeau, 2021).
Regional varieties and youth vernaculars The term Parisian French has been considered synonymous with the notion of standard French since the nineteenth century. However, the term Regional French as a non-Parisian French linguistic system with endogamous norms that extend beyond the realm of the native speaker to include new speakers of the language is much more recent, as is the extension of its definition to include non-territorial spaces (e.g., political, social) (Bertucci, 2019: Kasstan, 2018). Regionalisms and regional languages have been part of the linguistic landscape of France for centuries. Lexical and phonetic particularities of regional French varieties are plentiful and well documented, as are distinctive grammatical features, such as use of the past historic tense in the spoken discourse in southwestern France, the use of être to form the passé composé of être from Savoie to the Basque country (e.g., il est été), past participle agreement with faire faire constructions from Toulouse to Montpellier, and the use of pour + subject pronoun + infinitive in Lorraine and the northern part of the Champagne region (Ball & Marley, 2021). Many of these regionalisms appear stable despite exposure to standard French forms in the media and the education system. In addition to varieties of French with distinctive regional linguistic features, there are currently 23 officially recognized regional languages spoken by approximately 35% of the population. The teaching of these languages in the public school system and within an immersive framework has been an issue of great debate, however. When the Molac Law was passed (April 2021) to protect and promote regional languages through allowing optional immersive education in public schools, the governmental Constitutional Council quickly moved to censure parts of the new law, citing Article 2 of the French constitution that states the language of the Republic to be French. This sparked debates and protests throughout France, with local communities fearing negative consequences for the teaching of regional languages. The Education Ministry finally softened its position, sending a circular (December 2021) that acknowledged the importance of immersive education as a pedagogical approach but stipulated that French was obligatory as the medium of communication among staff, parents, and institutional partners (Coffey, 2021). Studies of French immersion programs (predominantly in Canada) have consistently shown many benefits of this pedagogical model for language acquisition. A large study of primary and secondary school children (N=513) in immersive and non-immersive settings in French-speaking Belgium also showed that students in immersion programs made significantly greater gains in 511
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proficiency over those in bilingual programs (Simonis et al., 2019). However, the study also found no indication that immersive education improved executive control (e.g., attentional abilities, language monitoring, code switching) over more traditional bilingual programs.
Francoprovençal A Romance language spoken in an area partly in France, Switzerland, and Italy, Francoprovençal has no official linguistic status in France, no recognized panlectal norm or prestige variety, and is no longer acquired as a native language among the roughly 120,000 speakers (Hawkey & Kasstan, 2015). Its style registers have dwindled along with its native speakers, its domains restricted to the private sphere. However, as Francoprovençal has joined the list of endangered languages, recent revitalization efforts have garnered new speakers of Francoprovençal, oftentimes well-educated younger city dwellers and therefore far removed from the more rural, aging native speaker population. Such speakers are acquiring novel pronunciation patterns, acquired through orthographic means rather than through the spoken language (O’Rourke et al., 2015). Even as the Francoprovençal palatalized lateral [lʲ] is being lost to the French [l] variant across speech styles and especially in more casual conversational contexts, new Francoprovençal speakers, influenced by written language orthography, are producing the palatized lateral and [j] in expanded linguistic domains (Kasstan & Müller, 2018). The lack of linguistic and cultural homogeneity in current regions of France (other than Corsica and Alsace) have made it challenging to identify internal linguistic boundaries between regional languages, such as Occitan and Francoprovençal, whose territorial boundaries and linguistic traits are often defined differently by linguists, local speakers, and language revitalization activists. For example, some local Francoprovençal speakers claim that people do not speak the same language variety on different sides of the Rhône (which has been seen as a political boundary since the Middle Ages) even though their claim has no linguistic validity (Bert & James, 2014).
Occitan Occitan refers to the group of speech varieties spoken in Provençal France, originating with the language of the twelfth-century troubadours and later encompassing numerous dialects and currently six recognized regional languages. French was not widespread in urban Occitan areas until the nineteenth century and in some rural areas until the early twentieth century. Even with the arrival of French, the maintenance of Occitan varieties has been greatly helped by initiatives of the Félibrige and the Institut d’études occitanes (IEO), both promoting Occitan language, literature, and culture, by a substantial educational infrastructure, and by extensive media programming, easily accessible through the internet. Despite such significant efforts to promote Occitan, however, a 2016 survey indicates a decrease in Occitan speakers, with no monolinguals thought to remain. Speakers fall broadly into two categories: 66+ years old rural male and those who have acquired the language at school (Noubel & Long, 2021). Additionally, the difficulty in establishing a common standard Occitan norm among the numerous dialects (Gasquet-Cyrus, 2004) has been an obstacle to its survival, with some communities hostile toward efforts to be grouped under one Occitan umbrella (Soupel, 2004).
Picard Despite the fact that Picard is officially recognized as a language of France, convergence between Picard and French has been noted in various grammatical domains and contributed to its common 512
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perception as an inferior variety of French or as lacking internal integrity (Auger, 2003). However, corpus-based studies of bilinguals’ use of particular morphosyntactic variants in Picard and French (e.g., ne deletion, subject doubling, future temporal reference, and auxiliary alternation) compared with monolingual French speakers and older written Picard data show Picard to be both rule-governed and structurally distinct from French, both qualitatively and quantitatively (Auger & Villeneuve, 2008, 2017; Villeneuve & Auger, 2013).
Alsatian Consistently spoken by 85% of the region’s population until the 1960s, Alsatian over the next 30 years decreased in speakers by 25% (Bothorel-Witz & Huck, 2003), with a steeper decline among 25- to 34-year-olds (Veltman, 1982). Social contexts favoring use of Alsatian have steadily decreased, with its primary sphere limited to family life. Only 19% of 18- to 24-year-old speakers of Alsatian intend to teach it to their children, giving as reasons functional impracticality and their own linguistic insecurity (Bothorel-Witz & Huck, 2003). In light of this declining Alsatian speaker base, Gardner-Chloros (2013) discusses increasing challenges to understanding the cultural and linguistic references in Alsatian literature.
Basque Although different in sociocultural origins and linguistic particularities, the social life of north Basque (in France) has nevertheless been tied to that of south Basque (in Spain). With the promotion of south Basque to the status of an official language in 1980 came a revival of interest in north Basque, which benefitted from the development of Basque media, technological resources, and a significant educational infrastructure. No doubt due to these revitalization efforts, the number of Basque speakers has increased over the last 30 years and especially in younger age groups. Nevertheless, according to a 2016 governmental survey, the proportion of French-Basque bilinguals has been steadily decreasing (from 26.4% in 1996 to 21.7% in 2016) as has the percentage of native Basque speakers (25.5% of those over 65 years old are native Basque speakers but only 5.3% of speakers 16–24 years old learned Basque natively) (Department of Culture and Language Policy, 2019, p. 226).
Local vernaculars in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg The development of large corpora of the French spoken in both urban and rural settings has facilitated examination of differences in the structural organization of standard French discourse genres and youth vernaculars (Benzitoun et al., 2016; Dostie & Lefeuvre, 2017; Gardner-Chloros & Secova, 2018; Marchessou, 2018). Marchessou (2018) suggests that some new vernacular forms are spreading by way of music, movies, texting, and blogs, which would provide some explanation for linguistic similarities in the speech of marginalized, isolated urban immigrant groups separated from each other by significant distances. Some grammatical innovations seen in French urban youth vernaculars have also been noted as having spread to the general population. In Belgium and Luxembourg, Vari and Tamburelli (2020, 2021) conducted a large corpus-based study to examine the implicit and explicit attitudes of the Belgishe Eifel (German and French speaking area of Belgium) and Canton Clervaux (Luxembourg) speech communities toward their local vernaculars. The Moselle Franconian vernaculars in each of these areas are linguistically similar and viewed as endangered, but the respective speech communities have selected different 513
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standardization options. The Moselle Franconian speakers in Luxembourg have a linguistically similar endogenous standard, Standard Luxembourgish, structurally similar to the vernacular but with official status alongside French and German. In Belgishe Eifel, however, standard German serves as the exogeneous standard variety of the more linguistically distant Moselle Franconian vernaculars. In their study, Vari & Tamburelli found that age, gender, and language competence were not significant factors in speakers’ attitudes toward language choices, but rather the similarity of the language variety to the standard and identification with the speech community. The preference for the vernacular over the standard was significantly higher in Luxembourg, where the endogenous standard is linguistically similar to the vernacular, than in Belgium, where the exogeneous German standard is distant from the Moselle Franconian vernacular. Additionally, in the Belgishe Eifel region of Belgium, participants rated both the vernacular and French more positively than standard German, and in Clervaux the participants had a more positive attitude toward French than toward German. These findings reinforce and expand on previous findings of explicit and implicit attitudes toward language use in this area, which found use of the local vernaculars correlated with a sense of identity and belonging and of the standard with status and economic opportunity (Schoel et al., 2013).
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44 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN ITALY Massimo Cerruti and Silvia Dal Negro
Sociolinguistics of language: variation in Italo-Romance Italian research on sociolinguistic variation, which has its roots in traditional dialectology and social linguistics (Berruto, 2017; De Mauro, 2014), is characterized by an essentialist approach (i.e. system-oriented) and a constructivist approach (i.e. speaker-oriented). The former, which has been prevailing since the 1960s, rests upon the notions of diasystem, architecture of a language, dimension of variation, and language variety (Berruto, 2012, 2017). The latter, which has been growing since the 1990s, is mainly focussed on intra-speaker variation and the construction of social identity in speech interaction (D’Agostino & Paternostro, 2009; Celata & Calamai, 2014).
Research trends Until recently, the majority of studies on sociolinguistic variation have been carried out on small ad hoc-collected datasets. Large-scale investigations have been generally conducted as part of the development of linguistic atlases, such as Atlante Linguistico Italiano (www.atlantelinguistico.it), Atlante Linguistico della Sicilia (www.atlantelinguisticosicilia.it), Atlante Linguistico ed Etnografico del Piemonte Occidentale (www.alepo.unito.it), and Interactive Atlas of Romance Intonation (http://prosodia.upf.edu/iari). Linguistic corpora, particularly speech corpora, allowing variationist analyses have only recently been built (e.g. Mauri et al., 2019; Mereu & Vietti, 2021; Ciccolone & Dal Negro, 2021). Others of a similar nature are in the process of being collected and coded (e.g. Celata et al., 2016). Moreover, recent years have witnessed the improvement of already-existing corpora (e.g. Savy & Cutugno, 2009; Voghera et al., 2014) and the publication of collections of texts (e.g. Pandolfi, 2010; Guerini, 2016), as well as the structuring of oral archives (e.g. Sornicola et al., 2019; Calamai et al., 2020). The last few years have also seen an overall change in methodological orientations, which is partly related to the unprecedented availability of some publicly accessible resources. Furthermore, Italian research on sociolinguistic variation has long been characterized by the almost exclusive use of qualitative methods. In recent years, however, qualitative reasonings have increasingly been supplemented by quantitative analyses. Corpus-based approaches have become common and several studies are now based on distributional evidence (i.e. the frequency of linguistic phenomena within and across corpora, Ballarè & Micheli, 2018; Cerruti, 2017a; Crocco, 2013; Fiorentino, DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-50 518
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2021; Guerini, 2016) and/or statistical methods (e.g. Celata et al., 2019; Cerruti & Vietti, 2022; Marzo, 2015). Other analytical tools, such as implicational scales (Cerruti, 2009; Guerini, 2018b; Ciccolone & Dal Negro, 2021), have been rarely used. Furthermore, variationist research has increasingly engaged in fruitful interactions with other subfields of linguistics. In the last years, the interplay with corpus linguistics, experimental phonetics, and linguistic typology has been especially important. The cooperation between sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics has led to the development of publicly available resources mentioned earlier. The application of the techniques of experimental phonetics in the study of sociolinguistic variation, as practiced in sociophonetics, has uncovered some crucial aspects of the individual representation and use of socially constructed variation in Italo-Romance (Celata et al., 2016; Felloni, 2011; Spreafico & Vietti, 2016). The interaction between sociolinguistics of language and language typology has aided in investigating the linguistic features of Italian and Italo-Romance dialects against the backdrop of cross-linguistic tendencies occurring in (neo-)standard and substandard varieties (Ballarè & Inglese, 2021a; Cerruti, 2017a; Grandi, 2019), and, in particular, a number of studies have dealt with grammaticalization processes from a variationist perspective (e.g. Ballarè & Inglese, 2021b; Crocco, 2013; Miola, 2018). The study of language variation in Italo-Romance has also benefited from some advances in generative grammar (Berruto, 2009a). Overall, variationist research in Italy has been providing both theoretical and descriptive insights. Theoretical reflections have focussed on key issues, including language complexity and its extralinguistic correlates (Moretti, 2018), the notion of language variety (Berruto, 2019; see also Vietti, 2019a, combining theoretical and empirical analysis), the ‘non-nativeness’ of formal varieties (Moretti, 2011), the problematic status of ‘diamesia’ (Pistolesi, 2015), the Coserian account of dialect (Regis, 2017a), the possibility of conceiving Italian as a pluricentric language (Berruto, 2011; Pandolfi, 2017), the architecture of Italian (Berruto, 2012, pp. 191–197), and the characteristics of various Italian dialect-standard constellations (Berruto, 2016; Cerruti & Regis, 2014). On the descriptive side, some linguistic levels have recently been investigated with the aid of instrumental techniques which are not traditional for Italian research on sociolinguistic variation, as is the case with the use of tools for speech analysis in the study of phonetic and phonological variation, at both segmental and prosodic levels (Crocco, 2017; Gili Fivela et al., 2015; Vietti, 2019b). At the same time, several variationist studies have focussed on linguistic levels which have been scarcely examined in the past, similar to the investigation of morphosyntactic features of regional varieties of Italian (Amenta, 2020; Cerruti, 2009) and discourse-pragmatic variation across situations and geographic areas (Alfonzetti, 2009; Calaresu, 2015; Fedriani & Miola, 2014; Molinelli, 2017). Finally, the growing interest in the emergence of grammatical features from spontaneous speech has led to the analysis of previously under-researched constructions of spoken Italian (Mauri & Giacalone Ramat, 2015; Voghera, 2013).
Sociolinguistic dynamics One of the key elements of Italy’s sociolinguistic situation is the coexistence of Italian and ItaloRomance dialects, most of the latter being Abstand languages. It is, therefore, no coincidence that many studies have concentrated on the contact between Italian and dialects, as well as on the regional differentiation of Italian (which has basically resulted from the retention of dialect features). Some of the most recent studies have addressed these issues within the framework of Auer’s (2005) typology of dialect/standard constellations (see, inter alia, Berruto, 2016; Cerruti & Regis, 2014; Mendicino & Prantera, 2020; Pandolfi, 2017), pointing out that in most areas of Italy 519
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the range of varieties between the base dialects and the standard is to be considered as divided into two separate continua: the dialect continuum and the standard language continuum. As for the latter, special attention has been paid to the ongoing processes of convergence concerning regional varieties. On the vertical dimension, the ‘downward’ convergence of the standard usage toward sub-standard varieties has led to the emergence of a new standard variety (i.e. neostandard Italian; see more on that later in the chapter), which consists of a nationwide shared core of originally sub-standard phenomena and some regional features occurring in distinct geographical areas (Berruto, 2018; Cerruti, 2009; Crocco, 2017; Gili Fivela et al., 2015; Regis, 2017b). At the same time, the ‘upward’ convergence of sub-standard varieties toward the standard usage has been leading to the obsolescence of a number of regionally and/or socially marked features, which are becoming increasingly scarce even among poorly educated speakers and no longer tend to be transmitted across generations (Berruto, 2012, pp. 59–60, 157–158; Cerruti, 2017b; Nesi, 2013). On the other hand, Italian is also affected by processes of ‘horizontal convergence’, which are mainly due to the supra-regional use of features originally confined to distinct areas (Berruto, 2018). This is mostly a consequence of internal migration and, therefore, is especially noticeable in Northern Italy (as the South-to-North migration flows have always been the most significant). Furthermore, studies have found that regional features spreading beyond their respective borders are fairly more widespread among less-educated speakers and in casual speech, and they frequently shift from being the markers of geographical provenance to being the markers of social identity (Celata et al., 2016; Cortinovis & Miola, 2009; Boario, 2017). The dialect continuum has been studied with special reference to the Italianization of ItaloRomance dialects. Recent evidence has revealed that over the past decades the substitution of dialect features with Italian features has mainly concerned vocabulary, while it has been less noticeable in phonetics/phonology, morphology, and syntax (Scivoletto, 2014). In fact, a significant number of structural peculiarities of dialects are still preserved. Moreover, most ItaloRomance dialects display patterns of variation. Sociolinguistic variables are indeed found to occur in distinct Italo-Romance dialects, at both phonetic/phonological and morphosyntactic levels (Celata et al., 2016; Cerruti & Regis, 2020). However, the existence of social and stylistic variation in Italo-Romance dialects has not been dealt with in-depth. The focus has fallen on the range of local varieties of Italo-Romance dialects (comprehensive accounts are given by linguistic atlases; see description earlier in the chapter) and the outcomes of dialect contact; in this respect, a topic of particular interest has been koineization (Regis, 2011; Ferrarotti, 2022; koineization processes have also been reported in the standard language continuum, cf. Vietti, 2017; Meluzzi, 2020). Research on social variation in Italian has concentrated on the so-called italiano popolare – that is, the social variety of Italian used by poorly educated speakers, most of them being elderly individuals socialized in an Italo-Romance dialect. Considerable interest has been drawn to the status of italiano popolare as an obsolescing variety (Berruto, 2014). In fact, some of its unique features are being lost and/or replaced by features appearing in multiple sub-standard varieties, as well as by standard variants, while others are spreading all over the sub-standard, thus losing their own specificity (Cerruti, 2009; Guerini, 2016; Marzo, 2015). However, research has found that the same sub-standard features can vary in their use among different social groups; in particular, they are sensitive to stylistic variation among highly educated speakers but can be employed categorically, or near-categorically, among poorly educated speakers (Cerruti, 2017b). Moreover, italiano popolare has been shown to have extensive inter-individual variation (Guerini, 2018b). Regarding language use in different communicative settings, several studies have dealt with the wide range of situational contexts characterizing computer-mediated communication and the 520
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related spectrum of writing and discourse practices. In this respect, the main issues addressed include how language users draw upon writing practices to construct and negotiate their own social identity in local contexts (Fiorentino, 2018); how features of the visualized language are used in everyday speech (Fiorentini & Miola, 2020); the blurring boundaries between formal and informal styles, as well as between written and spoken language (Cerruti et al., 2011). Finally, the last few years have seen a renewed interest in neo-standard Italian, which was at the centre of the Italian debate in the 1980s. The majority of recent studies on this subject have addressed the bottom-up process which has been leading sub-standard features, particularly informal spoken structures, to be used and accepted even in formal and educated speech, and to a certain extent in formal and educated writing (Berruto, 2012, pp. 110–122; Ballarè, 2020; Cerruti et al., 2017; Grandi, 2018). At the same time, it has been recently observed that neo-standard Italian is also prone to include linguistic features coming from ‘supra-standard varieties’ (Cerruti, 2017a) (i.e. the varieties located in the language space above the standard) (Berruto, 2012, pp. 23–30, 191–197), such as refined formal style, bureaucratic Italian, and corporate-speak (Bombi, 2017; Mauri & Giacalone Ramat, 2015; Renzi, 2019). Furthermore, it has been empirically verified that neo-standard Italian has come to coexist with the traditional literary standard variety of Italian (Cerruti & Vietti, 2022).
Sociolinguistics of society: the Italian speech community The sociolinguistic portrait of contemporary Italy, as it emerges from the scientific production of the last two-three decades, is that of a transition age in which the traditional and ‘autochthonous’ multilingualism, represented by the coexistence of Italian with local Italo-Romance dialects and a variety of minority languages, overlaps with two other tendencies. On one hand, there is the advancement of the English language in the higher domains of the repertoire (higher education, science and technologies, economy) and its gradual spread in lower and more general domains because of the popularization of digital technologies. On the other hand, ‘new’ minority languages spoken by immigrant communities increasingly occupy the lower end of the linguistic repertoire, competing with Italian, dialects, and historical minority languages. However, this sociolinguistically ‘crowded’ space is dominated by the national language which has become de facto the main language of interaction in most, if not all, domains by the majority of the population. Hence, local languages have not completely disappeared as they seemed toward the end of the 20th century, but the world codified by them has become increasingly marginal and their role in everyday communication has progressively reduced. Despite this, dialects and minority languages still provide a symbolic reservoir that speakers exploit in discourse, magnified by written and digital contexts.
Areas of investigation Sociolinguistic research in Italy is strongly shaped by the object of the research itself; hence, sociolinguistics functions as a permanent observatory of the ever-changing relationship between language(s) and society. The main area of the investigation remains that of the coexistence of Italian, dialects, and minority languages – a situation that can give rise to quite articulate linguistic repertoires, often characterized by dynamism, that is language shift or, vice versa, vitality; the latter being a fertile research field in Italian sociolinguistics since the seminal paper by Berruto (2009b) (also see contributions in Moretti et al., 2011). Contributions aimed at providing a sociolinguistic account of linguistic minorities in Italy, indicating relevant parameters of classification (Toso, 2008 and specially Iannàccaro & Dell’Aquila, 521
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2011) are paired with case studies supporting or specifying these more general typologies: see, for example, Milano (2010) on Arbëresh; Bitonti (2012) on Apulian Franco-Provençal; Scala (2012) on Sinti in Northern Italy; Regis and Rivoira (2014) on different minorities in Piedmont; Micali (2016) on the Occitan enclave in Calabria; and Dal Negro and Tartarotti (2019) on multilingual repertoires in South Tyrol. Another research thread in the study of speech communities and linguistic repertoires is that of quantitative methods applied to survey data, both to monitor sociolinguistic trends on a national level (Vietti & Dal Negro, 2012) and to explore the possibility to identify speech community types based on sociolinguistic indexes (Iannàccaro & Dell’Aquila, 2009). The stabilization of migration as a structural component of Italian society, with the increasing number of second (and sometimes third) generation individuals and their presence in schools and other institutional or societal contexts, has clearly affected research toward the investigation of migrant communities from a sociolinguistic point of view, focussing on the maintenance and shift of the heritage language(s) and the contact between home and host linguistic repertoires (see inter alia Cohal, 2014; Fusco, 2017; Chini & Andorno, 2018; Siebetcheu, 2018; Gianollo & Fiorentini, 2020; D’Agostino, 2021). A particularly fertile field of research is focussed on the migrant communities coming into contact with multilingual local communities, a situation that causes a total or partial reshaping of the individual and community linguistic repertoire and not simply the addition of new codes to the original repertoire (cf. among others Guerini, 2018a; Spagnolo, 2019). In the highly fragmented scenario of immigrant ethnic-linguistic groups in Italy, some situations stand out for their distinctive status. First is the case of Albanian, representing both a historical linguistic minority in Southern Italy and one of the largest new minorities in the last thirty years (cf. Cortinovis, 2011 and Perta, 2020, for a comparison of these two types). Another interesting case is that of the Tunisian community in Mazara del Vallo (Sicily) where, again, the border between ‘old’ and ‘new’ seems to be blurred (Amoruso, 2008; D’Anna, 2017). Finally, a new and so-far underinvestigated topic is onward migration (Goglia, 2021): Bangladeshis or Nigerians migrating from Italy to the UK bring with them a previously unknown Italian identity and sociolinguistic profile. A further field of investigation gaining increasing attention is that of Italian communities abroad. In his socio-historical overview of Italian emigration worldwide, Vedovelli (2011) points out that Italian emigration and its linguistic and sociolinguistic outcomes need to be considered as parts of the more general trends observed in Italy since they partly mirror it and partly contribute to its complexity. A selection of studies, dealing with relevant issues such as identity, language usage, the role of dialects abroad, return migration, and conflict between subsequent migration waves, include Prifti (2014); Rubino (2014); Goria (2015); Di Salvo (2015); Turchetta and Vedovelli (2018); Di Salvo and Matrisciano (2020); and Amenta and Ferroni (2021). In this panorama of studies mostly devoted to emigration toward the Americas and the UK, the position of the Italian language in Switzerland must be kept distinct, given its status both as an immigrant language (Natale, 2020) and as a national language (Casoni et al., 2021).
Research topics and methods These broad domains of investigation intersect with a variety of sociolinguistic issues and research methods. Since various forms of multilingualism characterize speech communities in Italy, the field of language contact is highly represented in sociolinguistic studies. First, this is about code alternation practices and code-mixing patterns. Investigated language combinations vary both linguistically (in relation to greater or lesser structural distance) and sociolinguistically (in relation to status). Cf. in particular Berruto (2009c), providing a theoretical frame, and a range of case studies addressing different approaches and phenomena in a variety of language combinations: inter alia 522
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Pasquandrea (2008) on English and heritage Italian abroad; Alfonzetti (2012) on Italian and Sicilian; Guerini (2013) on Italian and Bresciano; Mereu and Vietti (2020) on Italian and Sardinian; Ciccolone and Dal Negro (2021) on Tyrolean and Italian. Besides, the study of borrowing processes in the domain of discourse organization, especially discourse markers, has been the object of intense investigation: cf. Retaro (2010) on Arbëresh; Fiorentini (2017) on Ladin; Scivoletto (2020) on Sicilian; Marra (2021) on Croatian. A research area that has grown considerably over the past two decades is related to the social role of written communication (Fiorentino, 2018), especially about non-standard and/or minority languages. On one hand, studies have focussed on language planning proposals, notably the ‘roofless’ languages, such as Ladin, Sardinian, and Occitan (Videsott, 2011; Regis & Rivoira, 2016; Mereu, 2021). On the other hand, there has been an increasing interest in the development of spontaneous writing systems and, more generally, in the use of spontaneous and idiosyncratic graphization of local, minority, and non-standard languages (see contributions in Dal Negro et al., 2015), a phenomenon that has grown enormously because of the spread of different forms of digital communication (Alfonzetti, 2013; Casoni, 2011; Miola, 2013). Closely related to this interest in written communication are so-called linguistic landscape studies investigating the presence of (written) languages in public space. Mirroring the two main areas of sociolinguistic interest seen earlier, research on the linguistic landscape has also been primarily concerned with the presence of immigrant languages in urban settings (Barni, 2008; Bagna, 2009) and with local languages (several recent case studies are collected in Guerini et al., 2021). These threads of research in the domain of multilingualism and innovative uses of non-standard languages, whether legitimate or not, go concurrently with studies on language attitudes and perceptual dialectology (see, for example, Nodari, 2017) and on self- and other-representation of ethnic groups and speech communities (see Dal Negro, 2009; Veronesi, 2010; Scala, 2020; Marinaro, 2022). Finally, in the last few decades, other topics have expanded in sociolinguistic research, following changes in society. One of them has been the declining role of Italian as a language of science and higher education. If this topic has raised some interest toward the investigation of practices in multilingual universities (Franceschini & Veronesi, 2014), the trend toward a generalized use of English in higher education and scientific research has not only been regarded problematic for the status of Italian as a fully elaborate (in the sense of Ausbau) language (see Maraschio & De Martino, 2013 and Calaresu, 2011) but also as a paradox since the promotion of multilingualism and internationalization of research actually leads to a legitimization of monolingualism (Gazzola, 2012). This issue faces a very strong link between sociolinguistic research and the effects of explicit or implicit language policy upon society at large: a similar connection can be seen with the current topic of citizenship, nationhood, and, more generally, of sociolinguistic justices (or, rather, lack of). Whether language must be regarded as a barrier to exclude newcomers, as a symbol of national identity, or as an emblem of legitimate ancestry have all proved to be complex research topics within the Italian sociolinguistic context. Cf. among others: Carli & Favilla (2008); Guerini (2011); Barni (2012) and Iannàccaro et al. (2018).
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45 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN SWITZERLAND Philippe Humbert, Zorana Sokolovska,1 Laura Baranzini, Matteo Casoni, Sabine Christopher,2 Renata Coray 3 and Stephan Schmid 4
Introduction Switzerland is a multilingual federal state constituted of 26 cantons (political and territorial division units) with four national languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. The first three are official languages of the Confederation; Romansh is a semi-official language (art. 4 & art. 70 of the Federal Constitution5). Swiss language policy and planning follow the principles of territoriality and personality: the language(s) of the cantons are language(s) of communication in official contexts (e.g., education, local administration), whereas in interaction with the Federal administration, all national languages can be used. Official statistics6 indicate that 62.3% of the resident population have declared German among their “main language(s)” in 2020. French comes next with 22.8%, then Italian (8%) and Romansh (0.5%). Non-national languages, such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, Albanian, Serbian and Croatian are declared “main language(s)” by 23.1%, reflecting their important presence and use in Swiss society. Moreover, local or dialectal varieties of the national languages add to the linguistically diverse landscape. Sociolinguistics in Switzerland is thus strongly anchored in a multilingual perspective, which we will keep in mind in the four sections dedicated to each national language. Our contribution draws on various sociolinguistic approaches and reviews important work published in the last 10–15 years dealing with topics such as language policy, language attitudes and ideologies, language contact and variation, and sociolinguistic debates, without claiming to be comprehensive.
German The most important sociolinguistic characteristic of German-speaking Switzerland is the use of both Standard German and Alemannic dialects in everyday life, as pointed out in Ferguson’s (1959) seminal paper. Werlen (2018) discusses four different models of diglossia that have been proposed to describe the situation of German-speaking Switzerland, moving from Ferguson’s classical definition to other proposals in terms of language mode (spoken vs. written, close vs. distant), bilingualism and code-switching. Sociolinguistic research on German-speaking Switzerland has mainly
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focused on three domains of inquiry, namely diglossia and language use, variation and change in Alemannic dialects and the linguistic characteristics of the Swiss variety of Standard German.
Diglossia and domains of language use While the traditional view on diglossia (Ferguson, 1959) allows for a rather clear-cut distribution of the high and the low variety (the former being used in written and formal contexts, the latter in informal communication of everyday life), recent corpus-based research has revealed more fine-grained patterns of language alternation in specific domains such as emergency calls to police stations (Christen et al., 2010), soccer commentaries on TV (Petkova, 2016) or the use of the standard variety and dialect in Church (Oberholzer, 2018). It appears that code-switching between the high and the low variety is much more common than previously assumed, fulfilling diverse interactional and discourse-related purposes. Critical analyses of the identitary function of Swiss German dialects are provided by Ruoss and Schröter (2020) regarding public discourse in a historical perspective and by Berthele (2019) concerning the status of dialects in educational contexts.
Variation in Alemannic dialects “Swiss German” (Schweizerdeutsch) is commonly used as an umbrella term for different Alemannic dialects spoken in Switzerland, but there is no single unified variety spoken by Swiss speakers. Rather, regional dialects have retained their specific traits to a large extent, as is documented by the Kleiner Sprachatlas (Christen et al., 2019). A Bavarian dialect is spoken only in the village of Samnaun located near the Austrian border (Oberholzer, 2016). Studies in the language variation and change paradigm include an analysis of vowel systems using traditional dialect maps (Haas, 2010) and an investigation of the diffusion of /l/-vocalization by means of a rapid anonymous survey (Leemann et al., 2014). More recently, crowdsourced data have been collected by means of smartphone applications (Leemann et al., 2016; Hasse et al., 2021). One of the phonetic analyses carried out with Dialäkt Äpp data documents the spreading of uvular /r/-variants in Northwestern and Northeastern Switzerland (Schmid et al., 2019). An empirical investigation in several villages neighboring Chur, the cantonal capital of Grisons, documents the formation of an Alemannic koiné in the Rhine valley (Eckhardt, 2016). Eckhardt (2021) also describes Grisons dialects spoken by bilingual speakers with Romansh. An experimental study by Ruch (2015) shows slight accommodation effects between Grisons and Zurich speakers. Dialectal youth language is analyzed mainly from a discourse and interactional perspective (Galliker, 2014; Tissot, 2015). A first description of multiethnolectal Zurich German (Tissot et al., 2011) was followed by empirical studies on lexical interference from Standard German (Morand et al., 2021), speech rhythm (Morand et al., 2022) and the perception of multiethnolectal speech (Morand et al., 2020); linguistic features of Swiss German multiethnolects are interpreted as “dialect transformation” (Schmid, 2020). Moreover, the acquisition of dialects and standard German by adult immigrants is examined by Ender (2017, 2021) and Schmid (2020). Alemannic varieties spoken by Mennonite communities as heritage dialects in contact with other languages are investigated both in Switzerland (Siebenhaar, 2012) and in the USA (Seiler, 2017). Finally, studies on ordinary people’s beliefs on the distribution of language varieties have been carried out within the framework of perceptual dialectology, in particular in the areas of Central Switzerland (Christen et al., 2010; Schiesser, 2020) and Grisons (Graf & Hasse, 2020).
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The standard variety of German in Switzerland German is a pluricentric language (Schmidlin, 2011). Peculiarities of the Swiss variety of standard German are most salient in the lexicon (Ammon et al., 2016; Bickel & Landolt, 2018), but have been documented also at other levels of analysis including syntax (Dürscheid & Businger, 2006) and pronunciation (Haas & Hove, 2009). At the phonetic level, the dialect substrate is particularly evident both in perception (Guntern, 2012) and production (Zihlmann, 2021).
French French in multilingual Switzerland French is the official language of four cantons: Geneva, Vaud, Neuchâtel and Jura. It has a coofficial status (with German) in three cantons: Fribourg, Valais and Berne. In these territories, the official language(s) are used for administrative and educational purposes. Since not all Swiss nationals and foreign inhabitants are speakers of French, mobility across cantons has an effect on sociolinguistic attitudes and practices in French-speaking areas (Lüdi & Py, 2003; Marty & Zimmermann, 2019; Marty, 2020). Throughout Swiss history, Swiss-Germans settling in Suisse romande (or Romandie)7 have been perceived as a threat to French, particularly near the language border with German-speaking Switzerland (Brohy, 2005; Cotelli Kureth, 2015). However, since the 1970s, sociopolitical actors and institutions have been constructing Swiss language diversity as a social, political and economic asset (Duchêne & Del Percio, 2014). This contributes to easing or renegotiating tensions among speakers (Humbert, 2022; Schedel & Meyer Pitton, 2018). Language learning is a key issue in the Swiss political debate. For decades, French has benefitted from its prestige as an international language, which facilitated its diffusion in non-French-speaking schools in the country (Giudici, 2018). With the growing influence of English on the international scene, the status of French as the first “foreign” language taught in Swiss German cantons has been challenged. This has been a subject of debate since the 1990s, influencing political and educational policies as well as didactics (Stotz, 2006; De Pietro et al., 2020; Elmiger, 2021).
Regional varieties and patois in Suisse romande Standard French was introduced to French-speaking Switzerland in the Middle Ages through writing and school. However, until the 18th century, the patois, namely francoprovençal and franc-comtois, were the vehicles of daily oral communication. With some delay, the principle of imposing one “universal” language in France also impacted sociolinguistic practices in Suisse romande: dialect practice began to decline in Swiss French cities towards the end of the 18th century (Kristol, 2023; Aquino-Weber & Rothenbühler, 2022). Since then, linguistic and literary works have been produced with the aim of conserving the patois (Pannatier & Maître, 2020). Although there have been initiatives to revitalize the patois in Suisse romande in the last decades, its use remains marginal (Diémoz, 2015; Aquino-Weber & Rothenbühler, 2022). Dialecticism (the influence of the patois) is one of the four fundamental types of variation that distinguish French in Switzerland from standard French, the other types being: archaism, Germanism and innovation (Racine et al., 2013; Andreassen et al., 2010). The particularities of French in Switzerland are mostly identifiable at two levels: (1) lexical (Avanzi, 2017; Thibault, 2012) and (2) phonetic/phonological (Avanzi & Mareüil, 2017; Racine et al., 2013; Matthey, 2019; Prikhodkine, 2019). These studies show that variation allows speakers either to mark
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Sociolinguistics in Switzerland Table 45.1 Examples of rectified spelling Traditional spelling
Rectified spelling
oignon goût aiguë mangeotter
ognon gout aigüe mangeoter
a difference or to blend into Swiss society and, according to the situation, to be considered as a legitimate speaker of French.
Rectified and inclusive writing in French-speaking Switzerland The spelling of French is renowned for its difficulty, thus the merit of its mastery and the numerous debates it has generated since the Renaissance (Candea & Véron, 2019). Since the 1990s, a rectified spelling has been promoted to make French easier to write and teach in the francophone world. The French-speaking educational systems in Switzerland are finally about to introduce rectified spelling in school textbooks in 2023 (Epars & Gagnon, 2022), following 14 principles aimed at rectifying the so-called traditional spelling of French (CIIP, 2021) without suppressing it (see Table 45.1). Schools are also to introduce epicene language, i.e. gender-inclusive wording.8 A study conducted in French-speaking Switzerland and Quebec has shown that the use of gender-neutral forms avoids male bias associated with the grammatically masculine form (Kim et al., 2022). For several years now, researchers have been examining the influence of the use of the male grammatical gender (masculin générique) vs. the feminized/neutral forms on French-speakers’ perception of women in society (Gygax et al., 2019).
Italian The varieties of Italian in Switzerland can be classified along two essential dimensions (Moretti & Casoni, 2016): the territorial distribution and the type of competence of its speakers (native/ non-native).
Italian in the Italian-speaking area of Switzerland (ISIt) A number of peculiarities justify a separate consideration of the variety of Italian spoken in the area of Italian-speaking Switzerland as opposed to Italy (cf. Cerruti & Dal Negro, this volume). The concept of boundary (Bianconi, 2001) is paramount to defining the relationship between the two areas in identity, political, cultural and linguistic terms: for a historical perspective see Banfi (2017), Tomasin (2019) and Monastra (2022), regarding the relationship between Italian and the dialects see Casoni and Moretti (2019). Since the 1980s, ISIt has been considered one of the regional varieties of Italian and its linguistic features (especially lexical) are treated in comparison with the Italian norm. An overview of all linguistic levels (including a bibliography of previous studies) has been produced by Moretti (2011) and Baranzini and Casoni (2020). The differences with respect to the Italian norm are treated quantitatively by Pandolfi (2009). Various linguistic and textual levels of the journalistic genre
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are examined by Ferrari et al. (2009) and Pescia (2011), while Vaucher-de-la-Croix (2017) takes a historical viewpoint. Cignetti et al. (2017) and Demartini and Fornara (2017) deal with textuality in school papers. Several recent studies have argued in favor of including Italian among the pluricentric languages, considering ISIt the non-dominant standard variety alongside Italian of Italy (Pandolfi, 2017; Berruto, 2011; Hajek, 2012; De Cesare, 2017; Baranzini & Moskopf-Janner, 2020).
Italian beyond the Italian-dominant area Because of immigration from Italy, more than half of the native Italian speakers of Switzerland live outside the Italian-dominant area. Natale and Krakenberger (2016) investigate the repertoires and biographies of recent immigrants from Italy, which differ significantly from those of the 1960s and 70s. Aspects of language contact, maintenance and shift in different immigrant generations are analyzed e.g. in Cazzorla and Schmid (2022). Individual plurilingualism is examined by Berchio and Berthele (2022), focusing on language dominance, and by Todisco and Manna (2022), concentrating on L2-learner biographies. On Italian in Switzerland beyond the language area, four essays are republished in Berruto (2012), among which a contribution on “Helvetic Italian”, the pan-Swiss language of official and commercial use, which has also been taken up by Filipponio (2017). Various features of legal and administrative texts are examined by Egger et al. (2013), Egger (2019) and Ferrari et al. (2020). A more specific focus on language clarity is proposed by Canavese (2022), Felici and Griebel (2022) and Kunz (2022). Aspects of language vitality and policy regarding Italian in multilingual Switzerland are treated in Moretti et al. (2011), Berthele (2017), Casoni and Christopher (2020), Casoni et al. (2021) and Todisco et al. (2020).
Romansh Romansh is spoken regularly by around 60,000 people in Switzerland. The main distribution area is in a few alpine valleys in the canton of Grisons, but almost a third of the Romansh speakers live outside the canton (Furer, 2005; Roth, 2019). The Romansh core area is divided into five regions in which different idioms (oral and written) are in use: Sursilvan, Sutsilvan, Surmiran, Puter and Vallader (Liver, 2010). Today, all Romansh speakers are at least bilingual and have a command of German (in dialect and standard form) in addition to Romansh (in the local dialect as well as in the regional written idiom). This “double diglossia” (Kristol, 1989, p. 816) is further complexified by the supra-regional standard language Rumantsch Grischun, created in 1982. This diverse linguistic landscape has stimulated considerable sociolinguistic research (for an overview, see e.g., Grünert, 2018, 2019; Haas, 2006).
Language policy and planning The decline of Romansh in Grisons since the 19th century has given rise to a language maintenance movement (Valär, 2013). In 1938, Romansh was constitutionally recognised as one of the four national languages. The federal government supports efforts to maintain Romansh and has successively expanded legislation on languages. The canton of Grisons, in its language law of 2006, introduced regulations to protect the Romansh language area and anchored the use of Romansh as an official language and language of education in municipalities with 40% or more Romansh speakers (Grünert, 2015). The introduction of this dynamic principle of territoriality requires reliable language statistics. Since the system change of the federal census from a full to 534
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a sample census, data is only available for larger geopolitical units (Coray & Duchêne, 2020). When it comes to municipal mergers, the canton collects its own language statistics. Etter (2016) illustrates the pressure on the Romansh language when Romansh municipalities merge with German or bilingual ones. The most extensive language planning project to date, the creation and implementation of Rumantsch Grischun, has been the subject of numerous sociolinguistic publications (e.g., Berthele, 2015; Cathomas, 2014; Coray, 2008, 2014). Its introduction as language of literacy instruction has led to the emergence of a grassroots movement in favor of the idioms. Since 2011, almost all primary schools have returned to literacy instruction in the regional written standard. Today, Rumantsch Grischun is established as a national and cantonal official language and is occasionally used as a media language and in literature.
Language attitudes and ideologies Language movements and metadiscourses are based on language ideologies. For an account of Romansh metadiscourses and their “language myths” since the 19th century, see Coray (2008). She analyzes the change and coexistence of biologistic, instrumental-functional and economic metaphors and discourses found in contemporary debate. Discourses of endangerment are characteristic of small languages (Duchêne & Heller, 2007), also of Romansh with its long tradition of language death prophecies (Darms, 2014). As a method for analyzing language-related attitudes and experience, language biographical narration has been receiving increasing attention in recent years (Coray & Strebel, 2011), e.g., a research project on language biographies of young adults in Romansh- and Italian-speaking Grisons.9
Language use and contact Extensive language contact has stimulated a great deal of research into language use and contact phenomena such as code-switching. A summary can be found, for example, in Cathomas (2015, pp. 66–72). A study of “The functioning of trilingualism in the canton of Grisons” (Grünert et al., 2008; Cathomas, 2008), as well as several contributions by Solèr (e.g., 2018), have identified the use of Romansh in the family, at school and by authorities and positive attitudes as important language maintenance factors. A national project on code-switching in Swiss SMS texts has produced several publications on Romansh (e.g., Cathomas, 2015). They analyze the widespread bilingual practice with Romansh as the basic language and German insertions, with possible switches to a monolingual mode in Romansh in formal contexts. School is considered one of the most important institutions for preserving Romansh and for integrating allophone children (i.e., those whose first language is other than Romansh) in the Romansh-speaking area. For an overview of the position of Romansh in the Swiss education system, see Gross (2017). Various studies analyze the successes and challenges of Romansh (and bilingual) schools in Grisons (e.g., Cathomas, 2005; Gross & Flepp, 2012) and specify the basic competences in Romansh and German to be taught (e.g., Peyer et al., 2014). To date, relatively little research has been done on language use in business, where German dominates in the Romansh-speaking area (Etter, 2011), but Romansh is newly also being used as a marketing factor (Caviezel, 2020). Finally, reference should be made to sociolinguistically oriented migration research in Romansh-speaking Grisons which shows a tension between mandatory German language skills and language promotion measures in favor of the minority language (e.g., Vigers & Tunger, 2010). 535
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Notes 1 Main authors for the introduction and section on French. 2 Main authors for the section on Italian. 3 Main author for the section on Romansh. 4 Main author for the section on German. 5 Fedlex. Federal Constitution of the Swiss confederation. www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1999/404/en (accessed on 18/08/2022). 6 Federal Statistical Office. Languages. www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/languagesreligions/languages.html (accessed on 18/08/2022). 7 “Suisse romande” and “Romandie” are unofficial terms used frequently to refer to the French-speaking territories of Switzerland. 8 See Elmiger (2000) and Matthey (2000) for an overview on the evolution of discourses on the feminization of French in Switzerland. 9 Grünert, M., Kaufmann, F. & Sala, S. Passaggi linguistici: maiorens al spartavias. Sprachbiografien junger Erwachsener aus Romanisch- und Italienischbünden. https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/179426 (accessed on 18/08/2022).
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46 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN LUXEMBOURG Christoph Purschke and Peter Gilles
Introduction Luxembourg presents a case of complex societal multilingualism. Horner and Weber (2008), Erhart and Fehlen (2011) and Wagner (2019) provide good introductions to the sociolinguistic makeup of the country. Luxembourg is characterized by the historically grown coexistence of three official languages, German, French and Luxembourgish, in addition to important minority languages (Portuguese, Italian). Multilingual practice in Luxembourg is strongly related to domains of use as well as individual factors such as language biography and personal migration history. For example, while German is the traditional language of print media and literacy, French takes the role of the main language for legislation and jurisprudence; debates in Parliament as well as national radio and television, on the other hand, take place in Luxembourgish. Due to socio-economic mobility (high amount of cross-border commuting) and the overall demographic development (high percentage of foreign residence population; strong population growth), the country’s language regime is currently undergoing restructuring. The strong societal anchoring of German and French is diminishing (in favor of English). Moreover, current developments in Luxembourgish foster the gradual displacement of German from its traditional domains (in favor of Luxembourgish). Luxembourgish is considered the youngest Germanic language and has been undergoing three macro-level transformations over the last 100 years: (a) Linguistic Ausbau: Starting from its origins as a Moselle-Franconian dialect it has developed into the national language of Luxembourg (proclaimed in 1984). The last ten years have brought a political push toward standardization, including an orthography campaign and update of the official spelling rules. However, given the rudimentary implementation of Luxembourgish in school curricula, the resulting lack of rule knowledge in the population, and its active dialectal roots, the language today displays a broad spectrum of variation in speech and writing (Gilles, 2019a). (b) Domain expansion: The development of Luxembourgish from a mostly spoken variety into a written one that is present in all social domains has been largely shaped by the advent of digital media. Social media platforms have vastly contributed to the emergence and structuring of individual and group-based writing practices. Today, the language has replaced German (traditionally DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-52 542
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seen as “written Luxembourgish”) as default written variety among Luxembourgers, resulting in growing online text archives, especially the online news platform RTL.lu (Purschke, 2020a). (c) Societal revaluation: Traditionally, Luxembourgish has been seen in close connection with the genesis of Luxembourg as a nation state, i.e., both as a mirror of its culture and a symbol of a collective identity. The last 15 years have witnessed a new wave in the societal discourse on the practical organization of multilingualism in the country and the social status of the languages involved, with Luxembourgish and its role as language of integration in the focus. This discussion has resulted in political promotion campaigns, new institutions, but also in an upswing in public recognition (Garcia, 2018). Against this backdrop, in the following, we discuss the available literature on Luxembourg multilingualism and Luxembourgish. In the last 15 years, Luxembourg Studies has developed greatly, especially with the creation of the Institute of Luxembourgish Linguistics and Literature at the University of Luxembourg. We draw on older studies where it seems appropriate for an understanding of thematic development. We also base our review on a broad understanding of sociolinguistics that includes aspects of variation and change.
Multilingualism and language policy Research on multilingualism and multilingual practices is a comparably well-established field of research. One focus are the practical preferences and language policies of speakers in everyday situations (Fehlen, 2009; Fehlen & Heinz, 2016), e.g., in work contexts (Franziskus & de Bres, 2012) or leisure activities (Belling, 2014; Conrad, 2020a). These studies show a clear connection between language competence and preference in everyday practice. Other work focuses on policies and behavior in language learning and education, e.g., Redinger (2010), who uses a combination of survey data and analysis of in-class code-switching, or Hu and de Saint-Georges (2020), who examine the potential and challenges of multilingual practices for societal organization. In this context, studies on specific domains of language use, e.g., advertising (de Bres, 2016) or the education system (De Korne, 2012; Hu & Wagner, 2020), the role of specific languages, e.g., German in education (Wagner, 2016), English in EU institutions (de Bres & Lovrits, 2020) or the change in the social charging of French (Fehlen, 2014), or groups of speakers, e.g., language policies in Greek migrant families (Kirsch & Gogonas, 2018) or the entanglement of language with social hierarchies and issues of discrimination among Cape Verdean migrants (Tavares, 2020), contribute to a better understanding of the current dynamics in the language regime. In this regard, also the historical development of multilingualism has been researched, i.e., the historical role of German in Luxembourg (Moliner & Ziegler, 2017; Ziegler, 2012), the historical roots of Luxembourgish and its embedding in a “multilingual habitus” (Fehlen, 2018), or the historical development of the Luxembourg linguistic landscape (Gilles & Ziegler, 2019). In view of the politically driven development of the language situation, which has contributed to an increased ideologization of language policy in the last 10 years, a number of studies deal with the complex relationship between language policy, statehood and social integration (Horner, 2015). This development can be seen in the political programs of the parties for the national elections, in which Luxembourgish plays an important role as a folkloristic element (de Bres et al., 2020). On the other hand, the politicization and ideological charging of Luxembourgish as a cornerstone of a national identity is taking place in waves (Fehlen, 2016). Other studies emphasize the individual experience and structural effects of language policy in the context of social integration and citizenship regulations (Hawkey & Horner, 2022; Horner & Kremer, 2016). 543
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Attitudes and language ideologies Another line of research tackles language ideologies and the practical negotiation of multilingualism, with a focus on cross-border commuters (de Bres, 2014; de Bres & Franziskus, 2019; Franziskus, 2013) and media representations (Horner, 2011). Bellamy and Horner (2018) investigate ideological positionings in interaction by analyzing the linguistic status and social prestige of Luxembourgish as a national language. Stölben (2021) examines attitudes toward the official languages in the country, with a special focus on German, in a large-scale survey with more than 2,000 participants. Concerning the level of public discourse and the societal role of Luxembourgish, Garcia (2014) discusses the close connection between multilingualism, the nation state and ideology in Luxembourg, while Horner (2005) and Péporté et al. (2010) explore the historical roots of Luxembourgish and the specific political role it has been assigned for nation-building. All studies demonstrate the centrality of language ideologies for the development of Luxembourg multilingualism and Luxembourgish, as can be shown by a comparison of results from a large-scale attitudes survey with computationally aggregated stances from online user comments (Purschke, 2020a). Recently, studies on visual representations of multilingualism have become part of the research agenda making use of drawing tasks to capture individual and collective perceptions of and ideologies towards multilingualism. De Bres and Lovritz (2021) collect reflexive drawings on Luxembourg multilingualism from Anglophone expats with a focus on self-perception and everyday multilingual practice. They report experiences of discomfort with the circumstance of having to find one’s way as a (monolingual) speaker of English in a multilingual society. Purschke and Schmalz (2022) compare individual and shared representations of multilingualism in Luxembourg and Switzerland to highlight the differences in the respective sociolinguistic makeup. While in Switzerland, the drawings reflect the strong territorial organization of multilingual practice, in Luxembourg many participants discuss their experience with multilingualism as a form of colorful jumble of languages.
Variation and standardization One focus of research so far has been the relationship between standardization and the sources of variation in Luxembourgish. Newton (2002) reports on the history of standardization, Moulin (2006) examines the development of grammar from a language-historical point of view and Stell (2006) compares the standardization of Luxembourgish with Frisian, also considering the respective ideological background. Regarding orthography, Newton (2000) provides an overview of the spelling systems since 1824. Research into variation in Luxembourgish has seen a significant surge in recent years. While earlier studies mostly focus on aspects of dialect variation, e.g., dialect leveling (Gilles, 2006), dialectometry (Schiltz, 1997) or the historical emancipation of Luxembourgish from German (Gilles, 1998, 2000), newer studies (often PhD theses) systematically examine variation on different linguistic levels. Döhmer (2020) describes grammatical variation with a focus on syntax, Manzoni (2021) investigates intonation patterns in contrast with French and German, Flores Flores (2015) studies variation in family names, Conrad (2017) analyzes phonological variation due to language contact with French and German and Entringer (2021a) investigates morphological variation through a combination of variationist and perceptual methods. While some studies focus on specific domains of language use and contact (e.g., Conrad, 2020b), others focus on the connection between standardization, language endangerment and implicit attitudes (Vari, 2021; Vari & Tamburelli, 2020). 544
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Written Luxembourgish Compared to other domains of research, there is relatively little work on the development of the written domain in Luxembourgish. Previous studies have been concerned with the linguistic Ausbau of present-day Luxembourgish from a German dialect (Gilles, 2011, 2019a). In this context, one main line of investigation is the evolution of Luxembourgish as a side-effect of nation-building in the 19th century (Berg, 1993; Fehlen, 2015). In his survey of the literary field, Berg (2006) shows that Luxembourgish has today occupied the role of a literary language. Concerning the rise of written Luxembourgish, Gilles (2015) underlines the importance of digital and social media as multipliers for vocabulary development and the establishment of a writing practice. Some studies demonstrate individual writing strategies in group discussions on Facebook, with a focus on either the connection of language use and ideologies (Wagner, 2012, 2013) or the role of Luxembourgish for individual and group identity negotiations (Belling & de Bres, 2014). Using data from Facebook, Belling (2015) shows the prevalence of Luxembourgish as preferred means of communication in multilingual interactions, including typical patterns of spelling variation.
Crowdsourcing a country In the last decade, a new branch of sociolinguistics has emerged that pursues the participatory collection and processing of linguistic data using mobile research apps and crowdsourcing. In this context, two projects have emerged in Luxembourg, Schnëssen and Lingscape. The Schnëssen project (Entringer et al., 2021) collects and documents variation and change in spoken Luxembourgish. Participants contribute their own voice recordings and complete questionnaires on language use and attitudes. Since the start of the project in 2018, the largest corpus of spoken Luxembourgish has been gathered, covering a wide range of variation phenomena from all linguistic domains. The data is publicly available and can be used to investigate current trends in language change on a broad data basis, e.g., the ongoing collapse of the consonantal phonemes [ɕ] and [ʃ] (Gilles, 2019b) or inter- and intra-individual variation in morphosyntax (Entringer, 2021b). Furthermore, an interactive language atlas of contemporary Luxembourgish has been created (Gilles, 2021). The Lingscape project (Purschke, 2017) focuses on crowdsourcing the linguistic landscape, i.e., visual multilingualism in the public sphere. Participants upload and annotate images of written language in public and thus contribute to the collaborative reconstruction of public multilingualism in so-called “crowdscapes” (Purschke, 2021). The data can be used to compare the multilingual makeup of cities such as Vienna and Luxembourg City as well as to analyze user participation in crowdsourcing applications (Purschke, 2020b). While Lingscape started out in Luxembourg in 2016, it has developed into a research platform for scholars, education professionals and the general public with projects and contributions from all over the world.
Outlook Sociolinguistic research on Luxembourg and its complex societal multilingualism has seen a rapid development in the last 15 years. The thematic foci that have been pointed out in this chapter can be combined to form a multifaceted picture of a highly dynamic language regime. Against this backdrop, some routes for future research can be outlined. First of all, this concerns the further overall development of Luxembourg multilingualism between the factors of demographic development, economic dynamics and political steering. It remains to be seen how the role of the
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official languages of the country will evolve considering the dynamics highlighted earlier. This concerns the social anchoring of Luxembourgish as a “small” language. On the one hand, its current development into a fully fledged standard language offers many starting points for research, e.g., regarding the development of individual as well as collective literacy skills. On the other hand, the effects of the political revaluation of Luxembourgish on the complex structure of multilingualism are part of this. In this context, also the digital transformation of the lifeworld should not be underestimated which has fundamentally influenced both multilingual practices as well as the societal anchoring of the individual languages. In this context, comprehensive studies on the development of linguistic practices and attitudes towards multilingualism in society are especially eagerly awaited.
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Christoph Purschke and Peter Gilles Gilles, P. (2019b). Using crowd-sourced data to analyse the ongoing merger of [ɕ] and [ʃ] in Luxembourgish. Proceedings of the 19th international congress of phonetic sciences (pp. 1590–1594), Melbourne, Australia. Gilles, P. (2021). Variatiounsatlas vum Lëtzebuergeschen. R/Shiny application. University of Luxembourg. https://infolux.uni.lu/variatiounsatlas. Gilles, P., & Ziegler, E. (2019). Linguistic Landscape-Forschung in sprachhistorischer Perspektive: Zur Entwicklung visueller Kommunikate im öffentlichen Raum der Stadt Luxemburg im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik, 47(2), 385–407. Hawkey, J., & Horner, K. (2022). Officiality and strategic ambiguity in language policy: Exploring migrant experiences in Andorra and Luxembourg. Language Policy, 21(2), 195–215. http://doi.org/10.1007/ s10993-021-09602-3. Horner, K. (2005). Reimagining the nation: Discourses of language purism in Luxembourg. In N. Langer & W. Davies (Eds.), Linguistic purism in the Germanic languages (pp. 166–185). De Gruyter. Horner, K. (2011). Media representations of multilingual Luxembourg Constructing language as a resource, problem, right and duty. Journal of Language and Politics, 10(4), 491–510. Horner, K. (2015). Language regimes and acts of citizenship in multilingual Luxembourg. Journal of Language and Politics, 14(3), special issue ed. By T. Milani, 359–381. Horner, K., & Kremer, J. (2016). Contesting ideologies of linguistic authority: Perspectives “from below” on language, nation and citizenship in Luxembourg. In G. J. Rutten & K. Horner (Eds.), Metalinguistic perspectives on Germanic languages: European case studies from past to present (pp. 239–260). Peter Lang. Horner, K., & Weber, J.-J. (2008). The language situation in Luxembourg. Current Issues in Language Planning, 9, 69–128. http://doi.org/10.2167/cilp130.0. Hu, A., & Saint-Georges, I. de (Eds.). (2020). Capitalizing on linguistic diversity in education. European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(2), special issue. Hu, A., & Wagner, J.-M. (2020). Zwischen Tradition und Globalisierung. In I. Gogolin, A. Hansen, S. McMonagle, & D. Rauch (Eds.), Handbuch Mehrsprachigkeit und Bildung. Springer VS. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20285-9_52 Kirsch, C., & Gogonas, N. (2018). Transnational experiences, language competences and worldviews: Contrasting language policies in two recently migrated Greek families in Luxembourg. Multilingua, 37(2), 153–175. http://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2017–0017. Manzoni, J. (2021). Intonation des Luxemburgischen: System und Sprachkontext. Melusina Press. Moliner, O., & Ziegler, E. (2017). Sprachenpolitik, Sprachenideologie und Sprachgebrauch. Das Deutsche in Luxemburg im 19. Jahrhundert (1795–1920). Sociolinguistica, 31(1), 125–146. Moulin, C. (2006). Grammatisierung und Standardisierung des Luxemburgischen. Eine grammatikographisch-sprachhistorische Annäherung. In C. Moulin & D. Nübling (Eds.), Perspektiven einer linguistischen Luxemburgistik. Studien zu Diachronie und Synchronie (pp. 305–339). Winter. Newton, G. (2000). The spelling of Luxembourgish: Systems and developments since 1824. In G. Newton (Ed.), Essays on politics, language and society in Luxembourg (pp. 135–162). Edwin Mellon Press. Newton, G. (2002). The standardization of Luxembourgish. In A. Linn & N. McLelland (Eds.), Standardization. Studies from the Germanic languages (pp. 178–190). John Benjamins. Péporté, P., Kmec, S., Majerus, B., & Margue, M. (2010). Inventing Luxembourg. Representations of the past, space, language from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Brill. Purschke, C. (2017). Crowdsourcing the linguistic landscape of a multilingual country. Introducing Lingscape in Luxembourg. In M. Hundt, C. Purschke, & E. Ziegler (Eds.), Sprachräume: Konfigurationen, Interaktionen, Perzeptionen. Linguistik Online, 85(6), 181–202. Purschke, C. (2020a). Attitudes towards multilingualism in Luxembourg. A comparative analysis of online news comments and crowdsourced questionnaire data. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 3, 536086. http://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2020.536086. Purschke, C. (2020b). Exploring the linguistic landscape of cities through crowdsourced data. In S. Brunn & R. Kehrein (Eds.), Handbook of the changing world language map. Springer. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_220-2. Purschke, C. (2021). Crowdscapes. Participatory research and the collaborative (re)construction of linguistic landscapes with Lingscape. Linguistics Vanguard, 7(s1). http://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0032. Purschke, C., & Schmalz, M. (2022). Mapping knowledge and perceptions of language: Societal multilingualism and its socio-pragmatic grounding. In A. Jucker & H. Hausendorf (Eds.), Pragmatics of space (pp. 679– 714). De Gruyter Mouton (Handbooks of Pragmatics 14). http://doi.org/10.1515/9783110693713-021.
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47 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN SPAIN From the polycentrism of the field to activist practices in super diverse contexts1 Luisa Martín Rojo, Gabriela Prego and Anna Tudela
Introduction Writing a chapter on sociolinguistics in Spain is, without a doubt, challenging. During the last decade, this field has undergone relevant theoretical and methodological changes which reflect tendencies taking place at international level, but also, in some cases, pioneering them. The fact that the Spanish state has more than one official language in some of its territories and that sociolinguistic research addresses a plurality of diverse situations, explains this discipline’s dynamism. In addition, during the last four decades, the centralising political projects that took place in the history of Spain began to be reversed, which allows assessing a process uncommon in other places. Since the 1980s, the projects of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic political unification that started in the 15th–16th centuries, and were especially virulent during Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975), began to be reversed. After the establishment of democracy in 1975, started a timid process of decentralisation that resulted in the current seventeen autonomous regions, where linguistic diversity survives, with greater or lesser intensity, and was politically acknowledged, although only locally – that is exclusively in each region. In all these regions, together with the “common” language (established as such by the constitution), Spanish, different original linguistic varieties coexist, in addition to the languages of migrant communities. Furthermore, in each region, the legislation, the linguistic policies, and the situation of the languages and their speakers are very uneven. It is, therefore, time to see which results these policies have yielded. Nowadays, the territorial distribution of languages and the diversity of policies continue to be a source of tensions and conflict that, as the next section discusses, offer an exceptional field of observation to sociolinguistics. Hence, a large part of the contributions of the sociolinguistic research carried out in Spain at international level come from knowing the multiple situations faced by speakers of different linguistic varieties and their social and identity consequences, together with a complex and very diverse language contact situation. Along with this, since the 1990s, another line of work has consolidated, this one focusing on situations of multilingualism, associated with increased mobility, due to migrations and globalisation, in urban and peri-urban areas, with mostly an ethnographic and critical approach. This line also accounted for language policies, ideologies, attitudes, and practices and the situations of maintenance and transmission of these languages, as well as focused on the management of multilingualism in public services and, DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-53 550
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particularly, in schools. The research carried out in this framework played a leading role in the development of this critical approach at an international level. The greatest contribution by Spanish sociolinguistics in the last decade is the conversion of both currents under a critical perspective. This perspective, which goes beyond the languages involved, focuses on situations of social inequality generated by the difficulties of access caused by the unequal recognition of languages and their speakers, and by the unequal distribution of linguistic resources that entails situations of lack of access or exclusion both for speakers of minority languages and for recent immigrants and their descendants. Finally, the consolidation of the critical perspective is recently moving forward towards action research. In this regard, research in Spain is also playing a pioneering role. Here, the aim is to not only explore how the situations of inequality can be effectively transformed by people through actions and strategies of creativity and resistance but also to see how sociolinguists can be part of this transformation. This chapter will focus on these two changes in orientation: the consolidation of the critical perspective and the theoretical and methodological innovations that it has entailed (the second section), and how these innovations explain the emergence of two groundbreaking tendencies in current sociolinguistics in Spain – linguistic landscapes (the third section), and the development of action research and language activism (the fourth section).
Consolidation of the critical perspective and its new developments Towards the end of the 20th century, within the field of sociolinguistics, a critical current consolidated (promoted by authors like Heller, Duchêne, Blommaert, Creese and Blackledge, Pujolar, Moyer, and Martín Rojo) to analyse language practices in connection with social processes, such as inclusion and exclusion, social stratification, etc. While the study of language and communication, among other sociolinguistic trends, has often been approached against the backdrop of stable social groups and forms of identification and fixed spaces, critical sociolinguistics approaches have fostered a vision of language as situated social practices that unfold over time and across space. This approach focuses on social conflicts underlying the unequal distribution of linguistic resources in society, and provides the keys and tools to understand and analyse the sociolinguistic tensions and conflicts in Spain. Firstly, during Spain’s long history of centralism a linguistic episteme has been generated (see Moreno Cabrera, 2015; Del Valle, 2019), with a markedly imperialist character, sustaining an image of hierarchised languages, denying recognition to all the varieties the central State did not manage to erase, and which underpin the predominance and prestige of Spanish (including the entrenchment of this denomination) as the “common language”. On this basis, decentralisation began with the democratic opening in the 1980s, which explains why the attainment of linguistic rights is still seen by some sectors of society as a threat to the hegemony of Spanish. As Marimón-Llorca (2021) explains, at the beginning, the new policy was mostly received by the centres of epistemic and media power as an opportunity to restore dignity and space to Catalan, Basque, Galician, and to dialectal or historical varieties such as Andalusian or Valencian, among others, but gradually became problematised, especially from the 2000s (Moreno Fernández, 2019). The centralistic linguistic episteme, even though it has been challenged, is still a source, often distorted and manipulated, to sustain the most visceral, irrational and biased ideas in the media, as well as in political debates. However, this has not been the only source of tension; a second one derives from the current legislative framework that only protects linguistic varieties and regulates policies to guarantee the use of the languages in all social fields (normalisation) within the autonomous territory where they are declared co-official. Thus, non-territorial languages do not enjoy 551
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recognition or protection, such as Spanish Romani – caló – and languages outside their co-official territory – e.g. Catalan outside Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and the Valencian Community, which remains unprotected in Murcia or Aragon (Ramallo, 2018, p. 465). This policy based on the territoriality of languages produces an erasure (Irvine & Gal, 2000) of the languages in use in the state – for example, they cannot be used in the Spanish parliament – as they only have co-official status in their areas, maintaining the myth that Spanish is the language that unites and with which all the people of the state communicate. The strong roots of the onestate-one-language binomial and policies based on the territorial distribution of languages have not benefited the languages of migration either, which remain mostly invisible under assimilationist pressure. As a result, sociolinguistics developed in Spain has not only embraced the critical perspective, but also contributed to its development and consolidation, in at least three aspects that are highlighted in this chapter: (a) the integration of existing perspectives; (b) the redefinition of the object of study – inequality and the turn towards speakers—, and (c) the development of new methodologies. Firstly, sociolinguistics in Spain has contributed to integrate two main existing traditions in sociolinguistics: (a) the domination of some languages over others based in a territorial logic, with special attention to the so-called European “minority languages” and the indigenous languages of territories colonised by European powers; and (b) the discrimination for linguistic reasons of social groups not linked to territories – especially migrant, refugee, or diasporic collectives. In the last decade, in Spain some specific lines of research have already transcended this division. This integration has been possible thanks to a second contribution: the redefinition of the object of study. As Bourdieu’s (1991) theory of linguistic market pointed out, linguistic and cultural differences are valued negatively, or are not considered legitimate, when speakers have a weak position in the social structure and have to overcome structural obstacles for their social and economic success. In this framework, their linguistic varieties, whether minority languages in the territory of the state or varieties related to immigration, are not considered economic nor symbolic capital and are excluded from school, and, in society in general – in the labour market, daily life – do not contribute to alleviate the distributive injustice faced by these people (unemployment, poverty). Thus, the focus of research from this perspective is to capture the social and political order that shapes the sociolinguistic order, and its social and political implications. This includes how this order favours elite’s social mobility and their chances of success while limiting those of social classes and ethnic groups in need. Consequently, it allows social reproduction, by which the wealthiest classes and the dominant groups continue to be the most influential in deciding which languages and forms of speech are listed on the market. This perspective has been applied in studying the impact of language management in the integration of migrants’ communities, and in examining the ideology, methods, and discourse of the language revitalisation movement over the course of the past century and how this effort has unfolded alongside the simultaneous nationalist struggle for autonomy (see Urla, 2012). The same happens in relation to the contradictions that entail that co-official languages were treated by the administration as fully functional public languages while large sectors of the local population still treat them as minority languages not adequate to be spoken to strangers, and migrated people in particular, and their implications for the local political economy of intergroup relations (Pujolar, 2010). Secondly, another completely original contribution stands out: the turn towards the speakers. As Ramallo (2020) points out, contemporary sociolinguistics has been constituted and developed from a diversity of subjects, whose characteristics reflect social complexity: “native speaker”, “traditional speaker”, “second language learner”, “speaker of a second language”, “polyglot”, “expert speaker”, “receptive bilingual”, “active bilingual”. This research has introduced the notion of 552
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“new speakers”, i.e. those social actors whose life trajectories differ from those seen as legitimate members of given ethno-linguistic communities based on their primary socialisation. In contrast to the prevalent focus on native speakers, this perspective emphasises individuals and groups who in their everyday lives use a language or languages they have adopted later in life, possibly encountering issues of legitimacy within their “adopted” linguistic community. “Neofalantism” or “newspeakerness” is framed within this multidisciplinary framework, with projects at national and international level focusing on new speakers of minority languages (Ramallo et al., 2019; Tomé Lourido & Evans, 2021; Ortega et al., 2015; Urla & Ramallo, 2022). More recently, Martín Rojo’s (2020) work provided a framework that allows studying the impact of linguistic (self)surveillance, associated with accentism, discrimination associated to someone’s language use, and social stigmatisation, on speakers’ subjectivities of different kind of speakers – both minority and migrant languages, and speakers of “international languages” – and opens the field to the study of raciolinguistic ideologies. Third, methodological changes have occurred, such as the consolidation of the shift towards qualitative methods. This tendency already started in the 20th century, but macrosociolinguistic quantitative studies were still predominant. Today this kind of research is still numerous, offering data on language knowledge and use, with studies led by Basque, Catalan, or Galician public institutions (González, 2011; Monteagudo et al., 2021; Melià & Vanrell, 2017), and researchers using mathematical methodologies (Mussa et al., 2019; Seoane et al., 2019). In the same line, the analysis of the sociolinguistic integration of immigrant population has been developed in 21st century sociolinguistics (Moreno Fernández, 2009, among others). In the last decade, qualitative research has prevailed, promoting the use of extensive longterm fieldwork, interviews, and close examination of a vast range of documents to uncover the strategies used to preserve social controversies, as well as maintain and revive languages. The same has happened with multilingualism related to migration in Galicia, Catalonia, or Madrid; see Moustaoui et al. (2019); Bermingham and Higham (2018), and the works included in Márquez and Martín Rojo (2019). On the other hand, Galician, Basque, and Catalan as languages in the diaspora have recently attracted attention (Monteagudo & Reyna, 2020; Juarros-Daussà, 2012; Lasagabaster, 2008). Much of this research has contributed to the development of a theoretical/methodological/analytical framework, which following Heller’s (2002, 2006) and Martín Rojo’s (2010) definition, integrates interactional, discursive, and ethnographic data (see Prego, Pérez-Milans or Relaño, included in Codó et al., [2012]). The results of the analyses in this theoretical framework allow us to grasp the distribution and recognition of cultural and linguistic resources within social practices in contemporary Spanish institutions, while focusing on the institutional consequences for speakers. During the last two decades research projects have conducted multi-sited ethnographies, in institutions – health clinics (Moyer, 2011, 2019), bureaucratic agencies (Codó, 2008), call centres (Sabaté, 2014), nongovernmental organisations (Garrido, 2018), and service provision (Márquez & Martín Rojo, 2011, with works by Codó & Garrido, Gómez, Márquez & Martín Rojo, Moyer, Prego), as well as in schools (Martín Rojo, 2010; Llompart et al., 2020; Prego & Zas, 2015, 2019). On the other hand, the field of study of language and sexuality has continued researching topics that address gender from a binary perspective (Acuña, 2017; Bengoechea, 2015, among others), but more dynamic new research focuses have appeared which intervene in the (de)construction and negotiation of sexual identities in interaction to manage the “homosexual identity” in conversation (Amarelo, 2019). Sociolinguistic research shows that migrants face the same tendency to a monolingual imposition in all regions; however, institutional structures and ideological reception are regulated and coordinated differently, in agreement with the political project and linguistic regime of each 553
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autonomous community. Equally common are the shifts in the value of languages within the framework of global economy; in this case, we observe differences in the level of integration of English in institutions and practices (Codó & Patiño, 2018), highlighting the commitment of the Community of Madrid compared to the rest (Relaño, 2015).
Linguistic landscapes Initial works in linguistic landscape (LL) – an approach which constitutes a spatial turn in the study of languages, discourse, and society – analyse the linguistic and semiotic resources exhibited in public spaces. This allowed tracing the success of the processes of linguistic standardisation, and the visibility and symbolic values assigned to these resources. This favoured the implementation of this line of research in Spanish sociolinguistics, to assess the progress of language policies in regions with minority co-official languages (Calvi, 2018). This approach studies how languages and communicative resources are distributed and represented in public space, through different linguistic traces such as posters, shop signs, graffiti or tags, it allows to capture the symbolic or informative functions that different languages perform in this particular territory. Thus, the work carried out in the Basque Country by Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter is pioneering, but many authors have continued this area of research (in the Basque Country see Cenoz & Gorter, 2008; Aiestaran et al., 2013; Gorter & Cenoz 2015a, 2015b; Fernández Júncal, 2020; in Galicia, see Lago et al., 2020; Dunlevy, 2012; Regueira Fernández et al., 2013; Rodríguez Barcia & Ramallo, 2015; in relation to Catalan see Bruyuel & Garau, 2015; Colomé, 2013; Lado, 2011). A second focus of interest has been the imprint of linguistic diversity related to migration and globalisation in the public space. In this case, attention focuses on the polycentric distribution and hierarchy of linguistic resources in the new emerging multilingual ecologies. The project “Lenguas pa’la citi”, coordinated by Luisa Martín Rojo, Clara Molina, and Carmelo Díaz de Frutos in 2012 in Madrid, was a pioneer example. Madrid’s multilingualism has also been addressed in the works of Muñoz Carrobles (2010) and Saéz and Castillo (2012) or in works focused on the presence of Arabic (Moustaoui, 2018) or Chinese (Martín Rojo & Portillo, 2015) in contact with other languages in this city. Thus, the impact of multilingualism connected with migration or tourism has been the object of study in the research carried out in Andalusia (among others, see Pons Rodríguez, 2012 in Seville; Esteba, 2018 in Malaga; Franco Rodríguez, 2013 in Almería), and in the Valencian community (Gómez-Pavón & Quilis, 2021; Ma, 2017). In Galicia, LL research especially focuses on peri-urban areas with a strong presence of workers of migrant origin, recording the scalar distribution of different linguistic repertories with the mapping platform MAVEL (http:// mavel.avel.cesga.es/) (Prego, 2020; Zas & Prego, 2018). Finally, studies on LL dedicated to the protest movement have had a great impact on international research. Initiated during the occupation of the squares during 15th March 2011 (Martín Rojo & Díaz de Fruto, 2014), it has brought a spatial turn to research, based on Lefebvre’s theories on the social production of space. Within this line of research, work has been carried out on the independence mobilisations in Catalonia or Valencia (Morant & Martín, 2017), among other movements. Some of these initiatives imply a profound methodological change by already incorporating citizen science.
Action research and language activism As a consequence of all that has been pointed out, the existence of tensions and resistance to the development of a multilingual sociolinguistic order that allows the normalisation of the existing 554
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linguistic varieties in the Spanish state, the integration and valuation of migrants’ languages, and the participation and recognition of the speakers of these languages and of their repertoires and competences, a question has arisen in sociolinguistic research: Is it possible to change the current sociolinguistic order? This question is accompanied by a second one: What can speakers do to change an order that sometimes excludes them or calls into question their status as speakers? Finally, it is worth asking how educational institutions and practices can be transformed to make room for other languages and varieties, facilitate access for monolinguals and bilinguals, ensure equal opportunities, and guarantee the participation of people who have these traits. For this, action by the protagonists involved in a deep change and from below is needed. The linguistic situation has led to linguistic activism, in relation to minority languages, very remarkable in the Basque Country, where it is based on a tradition of associational culture, solidarity, and collectivity. In the case of Catalonia, given the significant presence of international migrants learning Catalan for social mobility and integration, speaker activism has also taken this direction (Urla & Ramallo, 2022). In the case of Galicia, the Lusista movement claims the normalisation of the Galician-Portuguese linguistic system (Álvarez Cáccamo, 2011), with different actions in the Academia Galega da Língua Portuguesa and the Asociación Galega da Língua. On the other hand, family language policies are another facet of language activism developed in recent decades in the face of the breakdown of the family transmission of minority languages. Thus, the analysis of the explicit or implicit decisions that are made within families to reverse the decline in the use of family languages is a new research focus, as shown in the works by Amorós, Galera and Poveda, Moustaoui and Llompart, collected in the volume by Moustaoui and Poveda (2022). In the light of these experiences, research itself has finally been transformed to accompany and become involved in these transformations of the sociolinguistic order and of the cultural and linguistic patterns with which linguistic resources and repertoires are valued. Following Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, the aim is to increase speakers’ critical awareness to achieve an understanding of how the management of languages creates inequality. Sociolinguistic tools such as critical sociolinguistic awareness, linguistic agency, the questioning of linguistic concepts and prejudices, can help increase people’s self-esteem and confidence, as well as allow them to reject ideologies that devalue them as speakers, and recover individual and collective agency. Thus, the research has adopted a citizen science method, in which participants become researchers who make observations, reflections and proposals, advised by the research team. An example of this is the project Urbanvoices, in which undergraduate students collaboratively share geolocated photographic material classified by language and type of violence, enabling the development of very diverse critical sociolinguistics research.2 In other cases, researchers have become involved with teachers’ organisations, and/or language voluntary organisations, and associations of all kinds, to mobilise speakers’ agency through the formulation of individual and collective challenges (Hernández & Altuna, 2022), such as those sponsored by the EquiLing project, currently under development.
Conclusions Throughout this chapter, two features of the sociolinguistic situation of the Spanish state have been highlighted: (a) a process of recognition and redistribution of linguistic resources, produced during the process of political reorganisation of the state and (b) the increase in mobility, within the framework of the new economies, and the greater presence of languages originating from immigration. This situation has become an opportunity for this discipline. In this way, sociolinguistics in the Spanish state, a part of being polycentric, supported by the territorial distribution of 555
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languages, has developed transversal lines of research, with which it has managed to contribute to the development of sociolinguistic theory, and innovative and committed research lines.
Notes 1 This chapter was supported by the joint research projects: “Towards a new linguistic citizenship: action-research for the recognition of speakers in the Madrid educational context”, reference number: PID2019–105676RB-C41/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and the project “Spaces of sociolinguistic transformation in the Galicia educational context: speakers agency, multilingual repertoires and (meta) communicative practices”, PID2019–105676RB-C44 /AEI/10.13039/501100011033, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Both projects are part of the joint research project “Critical linguistic awareness and speaker agency: Action-research for sociolinguistic equity”, which explores the role of language in the construction of social inequalities and considers how speakers may act to reverse them (see, www.equiling.eu/en/). 2 More information on the sessions dedicated to the Discourse Observatory at the EdiSO Symposiums celebrated in Barcelona (2017): www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1PKb7WH4eM&t=7sla and Santiago de Compostela (2019): http://tv.usc.es/mmobj/index/file_id/6657.
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Luisa Martín Rojo, Gabriela Prego and Anna Tudela Monteagudo, H., & Reyna, F. (2020). Language and migration. The sociolinguistic and glottopolitical dynamics of the Galician community in Buenos Aires from the nineteenth century to the present day. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41(1), 97–107. Morant, R., & Martín, A. (2017). Tatuajes urbanos. Los susurros, murmullos y gritos de la ciudad. Tirant Humanidades. Moreno Cabrera, J. C. (2015). Los dominios del español: Guía del imperialismo lingüístico panhispánico. Síntesis. Moreno Fernández, F. (2009). Integración sociolingüística en contextos de inmigración: Marco epistemológico para su estudio en España. Lengua y migración, 1(1), 121–156. Moreno Fernández, F. (2019). Variedades de la lengua española. Routledge. Moustaoui, A. (2018). Recontextualización sociolingüística y superdiversidad. El árabe en el paisaje lingüístico del barrio de Lavapiés en Madrid. Lingue e Linguaggi, 25, 197–225. Moustaoui, A., & Poveda, D. (2022). Family language policy and the family sociolinguistic order in a neoliberal context [Special issue]. Sociolinguistic Studies, 16(1). Moustaoui, A., Prego, G., & Zas, L. (2019). Translingual practices and reconstruction of identities in maghrebi students in Galicia. Languages, 4(63). Moyer, M. (2011). What multilingualism? Agency and unintended consequences of multilingual practices in a Barcelona health clinic. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5), 1209–1221. Moyer, M. (2019). Sociolinguistic perspectives on language and multilingualism in institutions. In Multilingualism, discourse, and ethnography (pp. 41–53). Routledge. Muñoz Carrobles, D. (2010). Breve itinerario por el paisaje lingüístico de Madrid. Revista de estudios sobre la ciudad como espacio plural, 2(2), 103–109. Mussa Juane, M., Seoane, L. F., Muñuzuri, A. P., & Mira, J. (2019). Urbanity and the dynamics of language shift in Galicia. Nat Commun, 10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09688-8 Ortega, A., Urla, J., Amorrortu, E., Goirigolzarri, J., Urana, B. (2015). Linguistic identity among new speakers of Basque. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 23, 85–105. https://doi.org/10.1515/ ijsl-2014-0033 Pons Rodríguez, L. (2012). El paisaje lingüístico de Sevilla. Diputación de Sevilla. Prego, G. (2020). Escalas sociolingüísticas. In L. Martín Rojo & J. Pujolar (Eds.), Claves para entender el multilingüismo contemporáneo (pp. 91–129). Editorial UOC/Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza. Prego, G., & Zas, L. (2015). Identidades en los márgenes de la superdiversidad: Prácticas comunicativas y escalas sociolingüísticas en los nuevos espacios educativos multilingües en Galicia. Discurso y Sociedad, 9, 165–196. Prego, G., & Zas, L. (2019). Unvoicing practices and the scaling (de)legitimization process of linguistic ‘mudes’ in classroom interaction in Galicia (Spain). International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 257, 77–107. Pujolar, J. (2010). Immigration and language education in Catalonia: Between national and social agendas. Linguistics and Education, 21(3), 229–243. Ramallo, F. (2018). Linguistic diversity in Spain. In W. Ayres-Bennett, & J. Carruthers (Eds.), Manual of romance sociolinguistics (pp. 462–493). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365955-018 Ramallo, F. (2020). Neofalantismo y el sujeto neohablante. In L. Martín Rojo & J. Pujolar (Eds.), Claves para entender el multilingüismo contemporáneo (pp. 229–265). Editorial UOC/Prensas Universidad de Zaragoza. Ramallo, F., Amorrortu, E., & Puigdevall, M. (2019). Neohablantes de lenguas minorizadas en el Estado español. Iberoamericana. Regueira Fernández, X. L., López Docampo, M., & Wellings, M. (2013). El paisaje lingüístico en Galicia. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 21(1), 39–62. Relaño, A. M. (2015). The commodification of English in ‘Madrid, comunidad bilingüe’: Insights from the CLIL classroom. Language Policy, 14, 131–152. Rodríguez Barcia, S., & Ramallo, F. (2015). Graffiti y conflicto lingüístico: El paisaje urbano como espacio ideológico. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 25(1), 131–153. Sabaté, M. (2014). Migrant communication enterprises: Regimentation and resistance. Multilingual Matters. Sáez Rivera, D. M., & Castillo, M. (2012). The human and linguistic landscape of madrid (Spain). In C. Hélot, M. Barni, R. Janssens, & C. Bagna (Eds.), Linguistic landscapes, multilingualism and social change. Peter Lang. Seoane, L. F., Loredo, X., Monteagudo, H., & Mira, J. (2019). Is the coexistence of Catalan and Spanish possible in Catalonia? Palgrave Communications, 5. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0347-1
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48 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN PORTUGAL Alexandra Guedes Pinto
The Portuguese language: an overview Sociolinguistic studies on Portuguese in the last decade are directly related to the status and situation of the Portuguese language in the world. This status justified the creation, in 1996, of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), which brings together states whose official language is Portuguese, with the purpose of increasing cooperation and cultural exchange between Member States and standardize the Portuguese language. This Community includes Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, East Timor, GuineaBissau and Equatorial Guinea.1 (See also Chapters 7 and 33, this volume.) The situation of the Portuguese language in these territories is not uniform. According to the World Population Prospects (ONU), Babbel and Ethnologue, of a total of almost three hundred million inhabitants, only about 254 million are native speakers of Portuguese. The different realities in each one of the Member States generate language contact situations that trigger important changes in the Portuguese language. Mother tongue, second language, national language, heritage language2 or international language of culture and communication, Portuguese manifests itself as internally differentiated in varieties, which affirm their identity in the pronunciation, grammar and lexicon. This diversity does not compromise the unity of the language, which has maintained cohesion between its varieties. Some linguistic planning initiatives, as the 1990 orthographic agreement, which united eight Portuguese-speaking countries in a uniform orthography, contribute to this cohesion.3 The New Atlas of the Portuguese Language (Reto et al., 2016) reports Portuguese as one of the five most spoken languages in the world, estimating its economic value, derived from its contribution to national wealth, at 17% of Portugal’s GDP. Data from Internet World Stats show, on the other hand, that Portuguese is the fifth most used language on the Internet, being the fourth on Twitter and the third on Facebook (www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm). By fulfilling a set of conditions, Portuguese has been identified as a pluricentric language (Batoréo, 2016a, 2016b; Brito, 2021; Castro, 2009, 2010; Duarte, 2022; Mota, 2018; Soares da Silva, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2018): (1) it is the official language in different nations, bearing multiple centres of irradiation; (2) it incorporates different varieties with autonomous normalising centres; (3) each of the varieties is recognised by the speakers of the other varieties; (4) it occupies DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-54 560
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different circulation spaces; (5) it has regularising linguistic instruments in the different varieties. In the words of Santos Silva (2016, p. 4), being the same language, it is spoken and written in different ways, corresponding to different histories, heritages, linguistic neighbourhoods, grammatical structures, pragmatics, cultural references and social uses. It therefore comprises multiple variants; it is a dynamic and multiform reality. All variants have equal value. There is no “centre” for the Portuguese language; it does not have only one standard norm, nor can anyone claim special property rights over it.4 Modern Portuguese, whatever the variety under study, originated in Galician-Portuguese, a primitive idiomatic unit to which the Latin spoken in the peninsular northwest progressively evolved (Martins et al., 2015, p. 44). The political separation between Galicia and Northern Portugal in the 11th century gave rise to the consequent split of Galician-Portuguese and the development of Portuguese as an autonomous language. However, even today, the linguistic similarities between Galician and European Portuguese (EP – abbreviation for the variety spoken in Portugal), particularly the dialects from the northern part of the country, are very significant. Moreno (2011), defending a future of iberofonia, based on the similarities between Portuguese and Spanish, estimates low levels of difference between EP and Galician – about 7% – and between EP and BP (Brazilian Portuguese) – about 3%. The studies conducted by Campos et al. (2019, 2020), based on n-grams in corpora, confirm these figures. In fact, although Portuguese and Galician are politically autonomous languages, linguistically they are branches of the same language. Lindley Cintra, in a dialectal cartography that became classic (1971), subdivides the current Galician-Portuguese peninsular space into three groups of dialects: (1) Galician; (2) Northern (Septentrional) Portuguese, subdivided into (2.1) “Transmontano” and “Upper-Minho” dialects and (2.2) “Lower-Minho”, “Douro” and “Beiras” dialects; and (3) Centre-Meridional Portuguese, subdivided into (3.1) Centre-Littoral dialects and (3.2) Centre-Interior and Southern dialects. The boundary separating the two major groups of Northern (Septentrional) and Centre-Meridional dialects, in the form of an isophone, runs through Portugal from northwest to southeast, approximately halfway across Portuguese territory.5 In the Northern (Septentrional) dialects, (1) [b] and [v] suffer a phonological neutralization, which often means “the switch of [v] for [b]”; (2) apicoalveolar specific sibilants occur, usually known as reverse [ʂ] and [ʐ]; (3) the old consonant [tʃ] survives; (4) the diphthong [ow] is preserved. The Centre-Meridional dialects perform the reduction of the diphthong [ej] into [e]. A detailed description of the phonetic features underlying isophones in EP dialects as well as the characterisation of more specific regions within these large groups are outlined in Segura (2013, pp. 90–92).6 Besides phonetics, EP dialects also display differences in the address forms and in the lexicon. As Segura states: “The existence of variation in the lexicon, according to the regions of the country, is particularly obvious in certain areas such as the zoonymy and the phytonomy” (Ibid., p. 87). The Northern dialects are more conservative, maintaining phonetic traits linked to GalicianPortuguese and the Central-Meridional dialects are more innovative. The progressive establishment of political and cultural centres in the south of the country (the capital, in Lisbon; the first university of the country, in Coimbra) determines what today is considered the standard phonetic norm of the EP, coinciding with the pronunciation of the “Coimbra-Lisbon corridor”. Cunha and Cintra argue that the dialects spoken in the Azores and Madeira archipelagos “represent an extension of the mainland Portuguese dialects and can be included in the Central-Meridional group” (Cunha & Cintra, 1984, p. 19). In contrast, Segura and Saramago (1999) suggest that 561
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Madeira and the Azores should be considered an independent dialectal area because they share several features, some of which do not exist on the mainland. The features of vocalic harmonization and treatment of the final consonant are two of the properties highlighted by the authors. More recently, Segura (2013, p. 105) argues that Insular dialects are distinguishable from the Central-Meridonal dialects of the mainland, adding that there are more common features between Azorean and Madeiran dialects, than between Insular dialects and dialects from the centre and south of the Portuguese mainland, a result corroborated by Rodrigues (2015).7
Sociolinguistic studies in Portugal Establishing boundaries between studies focusing on the description of EP and the description of other national varieties of Portuguese is not an easy task in the current research panorama. In fact, the awareness of the pluricentric nature of Portuguese has led to a very active scientific production aimed at describing varieties of Portuguese, almost always with a contrastive orientation, based on the analysis of the behaviour and evolution of certain linguistic variables in different national varieties, with a view to mapping the degree of closeness and divergence among them. The first volume of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Grammar of Portuguese (Raposo et al., 2013) includes, in addition to the chapters dedicated to the current EP dialects (Segura, 2013, pp. 71–142), a chapter on BP (Mattos e Silva, 2013, pp. 145–156) and a chapter on Angolan and Mozambican varieties (Gonçalves, 2013, pp. 157–180). This also occurs in recent instruments describing BP: several sections of Castilho’s Grammar (Castilho, 2016) refer to the phonetic/phonological and morphosyntactic differences between EP and BP (pp. 192–193).8 The project “Unity and Diversity at the turn of the millennium” (2000–2002), coordinated by M. Kato (UNICAMP, Brazil) and J. Andrade Peres (University of Lisbon), compiled many of the differences between EP and BP (Actas do XVI ENAPL, 2001; Frota et al., 2004; Soares, 2001). Later, the International Congresses on the Portuguese Language (CILP) continued this work of contrastive variational analysis with fruits that endure today (Silva et al., 2006). The constitution of corpora also generates a favourable environment for the development of sociolinguistic studies. The stabilisation of emerging norms that feed the pluricentrism of the Portuguese language depends directly on the stabilisation of the linguistic uses in force in the communities, through the survey of the phonetic-phonological, semantic-lexical, morphosyntactic and pragmatic-discursive properties that characterise each variety of the Portuguese in the different nations.9 However, as mentioned by Duarte (2022, p. 353): “there is a long work to do in this area, to be able to present, with some security, data of the Portuguese spoken in the different CPLP countries, despite the descriptions that already exist about some of them”. Furthermore, more studies correlating the linguistic variation with social factors, a major concern in variational sociolinguistics, are needed in all the latitudes where Portuguese is spoken. In the bi- and multilingual contexts, the code switching is not a free variation but a socially conditioned move that is correlated to power and identity (Myers-Scotton, 1993, 1998). Four very recent examples of leading international publications in the area of variational sociolinguistics in which the comparative aspect between varieties of Portuguese continues to dominate are: (1) The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics (Wetzels et al., 2016), a comprehensive overview of research within the EP and BP; (2) Studies on variation in Portuguese, (Barbosa et al., 2017), covering a range of variable phenomena within and across varieties of Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, São Tomé and Príncipe); (3) Word Order Change (Martins & Cardoso, 2018), studies in word order variation and change, including EP and BP; (4) The Portuguese Language Continuum in Africa and Brazil (Álvarez López et al., 2018), the first book in English on 562
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the African “Portugueses” spoken in Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe, as the volume presents itself. Currently, research in sociolinguistics in Portugal is mostly connected to the University R&D Units. Some of the most representative are highlighted next (in the URLs complete and updated resources are available): (1) Dialectology and Diachrony, R&D Unit Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (https://clul.ulisboa.pt/grupo/dialetologia-e-diacronia) (2) Between languages, R&D Unit Centro de Línguas, Literaturas e Culturas da Universidade de Aveiro (CLLC), especially the Linguistic Variation (VARIALING) Project (www.ua.pt/pt/cllc/ page/23269) (3) Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics (LTE), R&D Unit Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho (CEHUM), where the corpus Sociolinguistic profile of Braga speech (Perfil Sociolinguístico da Fala Bracarense, Barbosa et al., 2014) was constituted (http://ceh.ilch.uminho.pt/lte/) (4) Several research groups in R&D Unit Centro de Linguística da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (CLUNL) (https://clunl.fcsh.unl.pt/grupos_clunl/life-linguistica-formal-experimental/ projetos/projetos-em-curso/) (5) Portuguese in Contact, R&D Unit Centro de Linguística Celga-ILTEC (http://celga.iltec.pt/ pt/resources.html) (6) Several research groups in R&D Unit Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto, with the Dialectal Archive among other resources (https://clup.pt/) (7) Several research groups in R&D Unit Centro de Estudos em Letras (CEL) da Universidade de Évora e Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) (www.utad.pt/cel/)
Studies on other sociolinguistic aspects of Portuguese Other aspects linked to interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, diaphasic variation issues and discourse studies have been the focus of attention of Portuguese linguists. We highlight three axes of a very scattered field, pointing only to some of the most recent contributions: (1) Studies on discourse markers in Portuguese (Duarte, 2018, 2019; Duarte & Marques, 2021; Duarte & Ponce de León Romeo, 2018, 2020; Marques & Duarte, 2017; Plag et al., 2017; Ponce de León Romeo & Duarte, 2021; Santos, 2017; Silva & Chimuku, 2020; Sousa, 2017; to name but a few) (2) The system of Portuguese address (Aguiar & Paiva, 2017; Allen, 2019; Cavalheiro, 2017; Duarte, 2018; Duarte & Marques, 2021; Nascimento et al., 2018; Pinto & Teixeira, 2018; Pratas, 2017; Silva, 2020) (3) Language and gender studies (Barbosa et al., 2020; Cantante, 2020; Coelho & Kemmler, 2020; Cunha, 2021; Ferreira & Sousa-Silva, 2019; Freitas, 2020; Marques et al., 2019; Pinto, 2021; Pinto et al., 2020, 2021)
Future directions The richness of the geographical varieties of Portuguese is and will remain at the core of sociolinguistic studies on this language. Mateus (2010, p. 74) pointed out that language policy should “raise the acceptance of the variation that all languages exhibit, variation that is accepted as diversity, but not as proof of inferiority 563
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or superiority”. This author argues that in the African context, where Portuguese is mostly learned as L2, it is desirable “that the students’ mother tongues occupy a space in school keeping in mind the importance of the mother tongue in the child’s cognitive development and in the reinforcement of his/her cultural identity”. This option implies adopting a bilingual education system which, according to the author, is an advantageous option (Ibid., p. 75). Duarte (2022, p. 349) states that When considering Portuguese as a polycentric language, it is the two stabilized varieties, European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), which are generally considered, although there would be advantage (. . .) in also paying attention to other varieties in formation. Demographic and demolinguistic data lead Soares da Silva (2018) to warn of “a major geopolitical change of the Portuguese language in the second half of the 21st century, towards a strong increase of Portuguese speakers as well as the management capacity and standardisation efforts of Angola and Mozambique, the remaining PALOP and Timor-Leste and, thus, towards an increasingly international language, of multilateral management, responding to emerging national needs and standards.” (Ibid., p. 111) The definition of a concerted common policy for Portuguese in the CPLP10 depends on several cooperation plans, among which are scientific research, standardisation and teaching of Portuguese as mother tongue, second language, heritage language and foreign language (Santos Silva, 2016). The numerous studies insist on the importance of sociolinguistic research for the definition of educational policies, so, it is predictable that further work on Portuguese in these different statuses will thrive. Even in Portugal, we find cases of bilingualism that result from the contact of Portuguese with other languages (e.g. communities along Luso-Spanish eastern border (Segura, 2013); the newly established immigrant communities in Portugal, who speak their own heritage languages: according to Mateus et al. (2008), Mandarin, Ukrainian, Gujarati and Cape Verdean Creole are the most influent, but we must add the BP variety and Romanian, considering the relevance of these immigrant communities in Portugal). The connection between language and the construction of identities is an increasingly valued concept. Much of the research mentioned earlier engages, in varying degrees, with the way in which the perception of linguistic varieties affects linguistic choice and has impact on personal and national identity so it is most likely that future research within Portuguese sociolinguistics will address these concerns.
Notes 1 Portuguese has the status of official language in Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and Brazil. In Brazil and Portugal, in addition to being the official language, Portuguese is also the national language, as it is the mother tongue of most inhabitants. In East Timor, Portuguese and Tetum have been co-official languages since 2002, and, in Equatorial Guinea, a CPLP member since 2014, Portuguese has been co-official with Spanish and French since 2010. In Macau (Portuguese colony until 1999 and currently Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China) Portuguese is also a co-official language. In most of these territories Portuguese is learnt as a Second Language (L2), mainly in school context. 2 Portuguese is a heritage language in Portuguese-speaking emigrant communities in various countries around the world and is, in these cases, used within a group that is integrated into a community whose dominant language is another.
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Sociolinguistics in Portugal 3 To reduce the differences between the varieties of Portuguese, the New Orthographic Agreement – a project to unify the spelling of the varieties of Portuguese – was approved in Lisbon in 1990. However, the Agreement only came into force in 2012 in Portugal, and in 2016 in Brazil (www.portaldalinguaportuguesa.org/). 4 The quotations in Portuguese have been translated into English by the author of this chapter. 5 This dialectological map of the Portuguese continent is later revised and adapted by Segura and Saramago (2001). The isophones that map the aforementioned phonetic features in Portuguese continental territory do not overlap. To confront a more detailed representation, see Cintra (1971), Segura and Saramago (2001) and Segura (2013). 6 Two subdialectal regions are, e.g. that of the centre interior (“dialectal variety of Beira Baixa and Alentejo”) and that of the southwest (“dialectal variety of the western Algarve”). Both groups can be distinguished by the tonic vocalism where one can highlight, e.g. the variable degree of palatalization of the tonic vowel [u] (Cintra, 1971; Segura, 2013, p. 102). Another relevant linguistic aspect of the Portuguese territory is the situation of Mirandese, Astur-leonese dialect spoken in the Portuguese region of Miranda do Douro, which was recognized as a minority language by Law 7/99, of 29 January 1999. This political measure had a clear impact in this language revitalization. Also, the dialects Riodonorese and Guadramilese, spoken in the Portuguese region of Bragança, are surviving languages of the family of Astur-leonese dialects, however their survival is currently at risk. Barranquenho, spoken in the border town of Barrancos, combining features of Portuguese with Extremaduran and Andalusian Spanish, is another variety to consider. 7 Segura (2013, pp. 105–116) compiled the main features of the Madeiran dialects, which include the palatalization of the phoneme [l], semivocalization of the consonant [s], syncope of the intervocalic [g], reduction of the final [u] to [ɨ] and formation of increasing diphthongs by the insertion of [j] or [w]. A good compilation of studies on these varieties of EP can be found in Rodrigues (2015, p. 11). 8 At the lexical level, there are also comparative studies, such as the Lá & Cá Portuguese-Portuguese Dictionary (Simas Filho, 2011) or the European Portuguese Dictionary for Brazilians and Vice-Versa (Barros, 2016). Other studies in the last decade on lexical differences between BP, EP and African varieties include, for instance, Rocha Filho (2016a, 2016b), Castagna (2017), Lara (2017), Armindo (2020), to name but a few. 9 Several Portuguese corpora are currently available, namely CRPC (Corpus de Referência do Português Contemporâneo) www.clul.ul.pt/pt/recursos/183-crpc#cqp/; CETEMPúblico (Corpus de Extratos de Textos Eletrónicos) MCT/Público www.linguateca.pt/CETEMPublico/; Corpus do Português (Davies & Ferreira, 2006) www.corpusdoportugues.org/. 10 The CPLP approved action plans in 2010, 2014 and 2016 (“New Strategic Vision of the CPLP 2016– 2026”). The International Institute of the Portuguese Language (IILP), based in Cape Verde, as well as the national language and culture institutes of each Member State (in the case of Portugal, the Institute for Cooperation and Language, Instituto Camões) are also relevant in this regard.
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Alexandra Guedes Pinto Rocha Filho, J. (2016a). E Pluribus Unum: Encontros e desencontros luso-brasileiros (parte I). A Folha: Boletim da língua portuguesa nas instituições europeias, 50, 1–5. Rocha Filho, J. (2016b). E Pluribus Unum: Encontros e desencontros luso-brasileiros (parte II). A Folha: Boletim da língua portuguesa nas instituições europeias, 51, 5–8. Rodrigues, B. J. A. (2015). Variedade dialetal madeirense: análise acústica das vogais tónicas orais [Dissertação de Mestrado, Universidade de Aveiro]. Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto. https://ria. ua.pt/bitstream/10773/14599/1/Tese.pdf Santos, I. J. A. (2017). Mecanismos de conexão frásica: a importância das variáveis sociais [Tese de Doutoramento, Universidade do Minho]. Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Minho. http://repositorium. sdum.uminho.pt/handle/1822/48619 Santos Silva, A. (2016). Da língua como solo e como horizonte (prefácio). In L. Reto, F. L. Machado and J. P. Esperança, orgs. Novo Atlas da Língua Portuguesa. Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda. Segura, L. (2013). Geografia da língua portuguesa e Variedades dialetais do Português Europeu. In E. B. P. Raposo, M. F. B. Nascimento, M. A. C. Mota, L. Segura and A. Mendes, orgs. Gramática do Português (Vol. I, pp. 71–142). Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Segura, L., & Saramago, J. (1999). Açores e Madeira: Autonomia e coesão dialectais. In I. Hub Faria, org. Lindley Cintra. Homenagem ao Homem, ao Mestre e ao Cidadão (pp. 707–738). Edições Cosmos e Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa. Segura, L., & Saramago, J. (2001). Variedades dialetais Portuguesas. In Caminhos do Português, Exposição Comemorativa do Ano Europeu das Línguas (catálogo). Biblioteca Nacional. Silva, A. A., & Chimuku, L. (2020). Enquadramento semântico-pragmático dos itens ainda e ainda só: Um olhar para a variedade do português falado em Angola. Confluência, 58(1), 190–208. Silva, A. K. (2020). Formas de tratamento no português de Angola. Estudo sociolinguístico [Tese de Doutoramento, Universidade de Évora]. Repositório Aberto da Universidade de Évora. https://dspace.uevora.pt/ rdpc/handle/10174/28355 Silva, M. C. F., Matos, G., & Menuzzi, S. de M. (Eds.) (2006). Letras de Hoje, 41(1). Simas Filho, R. (2011). Dicionário lá & cá português-português. Thesaurus. Soares, M. E. (Org.). (2001). Colóquio Português Europeu – Português Brasileiro: unidade e diversidade na passagem do milênio. Boletim da Associação Brasileira de Linguística, 26 (Nr.º Especial), 362–423. Soares da Silva, A. (2014). The pluricentricity of Portuguese: A sociolectometrical approach to divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese. In A. Soares da Silva (Ed.), Pluricentricity: Language variation and sociogognitive dimensions (pp. 143–188). Mouton de Gruyter. Soares da Silva, A. (2016a). The cognitive approach to pluricentric languages and the pluricentricity of Portuguese: What’s really new? In R. Muhr (Ed.), Pluricentric languages and non-dominant varieties worldwide. Part II: The pluricentricity of Portuguese and Spanish. New concepts and descriptions. Peter Lang Verlag. http://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-07113-9 Soares da Silva, A. (2016b). O português como língua pluricêntrica: Indicadores linguísticos e sociais e novos métodos de investigação. In J. Teixeira, org. O Português como Língua num Mundo Global. Problemas e Potencialidades (pp. 37–83). Centro de Estudos Lusíadas da Universidade do Minho e Edições Húmus. Soares da Silva, A. (2018). O português no mundo e a sua estandardização: entre a realidade de uma língua pluricêntrica e o desejo de uma língua internacional. In H. Barroso (Ed.), O português na casa do mundo, hoje. Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho e Edições Húmus. Sousa, S. (2017). O marcador discursivo sim em Português Europeu Contemporâneo: contributos para a sua tradução em Inglês. In A. P. Loureiro, C. Carapinha and C. Plag, coords. Marcadores discursivos em tradução (pp. 91–103). Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra. Wetzels, W., Menuzzi, S., & Costa, J. (Eds.). (2016). The handbook of Portuguese linguistics. John Wiley & Sons. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118791844
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49 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN MALTA Sarah Grech
Introduction The Maltese islands lie at the southernmost edge of Europe, further south than the tip of North Africa and – for some intrepid souls – a swimmable distance from Sicily’s southern coast. Malta is the larger of two well-populated islands, and the seat of government and administration. Gozo is the smaller island, historically more rural, and a keen focus for local dialect study. The population was 516,000 at end of 2020 (NSO Malta). Maltese and English are official languages, with Maltese considered “national” (1964, The Constitution of Malta), and Maltese sign language (LSM) also officially established since 2016. Italian has been an important language since the 1500s and its influence is still evident today. For a very comprehensive account of linguistic and sociolinguistic history of the the islands, Brincat’s (2011) volume is rich in detail. A legacy of linguistic diversity survives today with Maltese and its dialects still proving the inalienable anchor for the vast majority of its speakers. This short chapter will briefly synthesise some key trends in Maltese sociolinguistics of both language and society over the last decade. Maltese and English tend to occupy the lion’s share of research to date, though it should be noted that other languages – most pertinently, Italian – are increasingly relevant to ongoing research, and will most likely need further study on their role in the language environment of the islands.1 Historically, linguists have typically classified Malta’s linguistic context as diglossic, with Maltese being the widely spoken low variety, and Italian (from 1530s) and later also English (from mid 1800s) as high varieties for wider interaction amongst the educated classes, the church, or for international communication (Brincat, 2011). However, more recent studies are hinting that this is changing, as the true effects of a globalised world take hold. Research in the last decade suggests a (gradual) shift towards a more finely tuned pluricentric view of a multilingual society.
Sociolinguistics of language The most recent national survey reports 97% considering Maltese as their first language (Il-Kunsill Nazzjonali tal-Ilsien Malti, 2021). In each domain surveyed, a small proportion of respondents claim to use Maltese and English as opposed to either one or the other exclusively, and it was noted that Maltese could do with greater visibility. The report concludes about both official languages 569
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that, “rather than being in competition, they complement each other”. (The State of the Maltese Language National Survey, 2021, p. 3.) This view of Maltese as a mid-sized language thriving alongside a much larger global language such as English is encouraging, but does not account for the lack of visibility of Maltese in public places and across various media, where, as Gatt (2017) notes, it is quite usual to find both languages appearing in the same text in a code-switching pattern that recalls typical spoken utterances. Equally, two separate studies on linguistic landscaping (Sciriha & Vassallo, 2015; Camilleri Grima, 2020) both suggest that “when it comes to the written medium many Maltese opt for English (and other languages)” (Camilleri Grima, 2020, p. 218). Several edited volumes addressing different aspects of Maltese linguistics have been published in the last decade alone, as well as a dedicated journal issue (International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism), all including articles on sociolinguistic research (see also Paggio & Gatt, 2018). Three of these volumes (Comrie et al., 2009; Caruana et al., 2011; Borg et al., 2014), were compiled within the context of The International Association of Maltese Linguistics in Bremen (see Fabri, 2010). This work has clearly stimulated interest in the wider academic context, as evidenced by a healthy number of undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations oriented in sociolinguistics and including, among others, the use of different registers and semantic fields, or parent-child interaction in Maltese. Too numerous to list here, they are included on www.malti. mt, the public profile of the Department of Maltese at L-Università ta’ Malta. A healthy body of research on both Maltese and English dialects in Malta and Gozo indicates a richer context still. Initially prompted by a concern that dialects were on the wane, most studies first focused on gathering, describing and disseminating dialect data (Vella et al., 2020), in turn encouraging a revived interest in dialects, which has since led to more awareness, as well as the beginnings of sociolinguistic investigation. Two papers in Caruana et al. (2011) illustrate how Maltese dialects are still in use, despite the usual challenges of increasing geographical mobility and changing demographics (Borg, 2011). In some cases, dialects are actively nurtured for “the sense of belonging to the community and personal identity within that community” which they bring (Azzopardi-Alexander, 2011). Borg (2011) draws on a range of small-scale studies including university dissertations, to illustrate variation across all linguistic systems in a number of dialects including standard Maltese. Additionally, a 2016 master’s dissertation presents an acoustic/auditory analysis of two Gozitan dialects which indicates regional and sociolinguistic variation and within-dialect variability. The results here indicate an area needing much more exploration, particularly regarding the interesting suggestion of a gender effect with the female speakers retaining more distinctly dialectal vowels than the males (Farrugia, 2016, p. 217). Farrugia attributes this to the observation that the female participants were less exposed to other language varieties than their male counterparts, who left their towns for work, while the women (in this age group, 41–55) either did not work outside the home or did so later in life, once family responsibilities diminished. Maltese English (MaltE) is also increasingly considered as an emerging variety resulting from the ongoing use in close contact with Maltese and Gozitan varieties, as well as with the use of Italian. Although closely associated with education (e.g. Schembri, 2018; Frendo, 2018), and sometimes compared unfavourably with more standardised varieties, the English used in Malta is increasingly described and investigated on its own terms (Thusat et al., 2009; Vella, 2013; Bonnici et al., 2020), and in relation to locally relevant social meaning (Grech, 2015; Azzopardi-Alexander, 2017; Grech & Vella, 2015; Grech & Vella, 2018; Caruana & Mori, 2021). The research in this field indicates variability at all levels, including lexical fields (Krug & Sönning, 2018) and pragmatics, too (e.g. politeness, in Cremona et al., 2017, or hate speech in Assimakopoulos & Vella Muskat, 2018), but most study has been done on phonetic/phonological 570
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features seen to index rich social meaning. Bonnici (2010) presents the first effort at a socially indexed study of rhoticity to find a strong correlation of increased rhoticity with younger generations. Azzopardi-Alexander (2017) examines the vowel spaces and selected features of eight MaltE speakers characterised by their fluency in Maltese and English. Rhythm and variability in vowel duration patterns are also considered to clearly index social meaning in Grech and Vella (2018). The range of recent studies taking a more variationist approach to the study of one variety of a language used widely in Malta and Gozo can provide direction for further research in this area. Code-switching is often examined as one effect of contact situations, mostly between Maltese and English, but also sometimes between regional and standardised varieties of Maltese. It is locally sometimes found to be so widespread that speakers “may not even be aware of choosing one code over another” (Camilleri Grima, 2013a, p. 46). Once considered evidence of poor language skills, code-switching is increasingly accepted as evidence of creativity (AzzopardiAlexander, 2016) and an inherent local feature. Camilleri Grima (2013a) found that speakers were routinely expected to function both bilingually and monolingually, suggesting that the ability to both switch between codes, as well as to maintain one code when needed, is a typical characteristic of Maltese speakers which may go some way to ensuring the vitality of both languages into the future. A controlled study from Azzopardi Alexander (2016) examines what she considers is more akin to translanguaging practices in children aged birth to five years, and also concludes that the use of both Maltese and English is present in different proportions depending on the child’s background, marking the beginnings of “a significant degree of competence” in written and spoken Maltese and English. Some studies relevant to the sociolinguistic field can also loosely be gathered within the domain of pragmatics and/or specific registers, and although still a little sporadic, they nevertheless also provide important direction for extended research. Investigations include giving and receiving compliments in Maltese (Camilleri Grima, 2011), the extent to which legislation safeguards Maltese and associated implications (Pace & Borg, 2017), as well as the language of local online chat and social media platforms (Brincat & Caruana, 2011; Gatt, 2017; Vella, 2014; Assimakopoulos & Vella Muskat, 2018). Language in healthcare is briefly addressed in Buttigieg et al. (2018), while Spagnol and Spiteri (2013) illustrate Maltese medical terminology.
Sociolinguistics of society A gradual shift from diglossia to bilingualism is documented from the 1980s onwards, and Vella (2013) credits Borg’s (1986) early efforts to characterise the developing context as a continuum of use of languages and varieties ranging from dialectal Maltese on one end, through to (a standardised version of) English on the other. Vella sums up her study of language usage across various domains as, “regardless of what the dominant home language is, it is practically impossible for a child to grow up in a strictly monolingual environment” (Vella, 2013, p. 11). A bilingual context is endorsed by The National Council for the Maltese Language, legally appointed under the Maltese Language Act (2005), to uphold the interests of the Maltese language. On its website, the council promotes the use of both Maltese and English, underlining that any published materials should use both, ideally foregrounding Maltese. Academic research and community support has also driven language planning with notable success in relation to Maltese Sign Language (LSM). The history of the Deaf community’s development of a distinct identity and recognised language is documented in Azzopardi-Alexander (2018), with the language now codified in a dedicated online dictionary, available at https://mlrs. research.um.edu.mt/resources/lsm/aboutdict/. 571
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A little more tentatively, the increasingly multilingual reality that extends beyond the official languages has also recently started to be accounted for more systematically, in part thanks to the overarching drive of Malta’s membership of the European Union. In particular, as Caruana and Santipolo (2021) note, two national documents, one aimed at early years education and the other at the local integration of immigrants (2016 and 2017 respectively)2 have set the ball rolling in formal language policy, even if, as the authors point out, some aspects of the documentation need further unpacking. On the whole, however, the documentation is seen as a positive step, and with respect to education, it “marks a break from previous policies in which they [languages] were excessively compartmentalised” (Caruana & Santipolo, 2021, p. 147). Education is one domain which has been quite extensively studied also in relation to implementation of language policy, or the lack thereof, and indicates some important directions for research. Several studies underline the extensive interchange – not yet formally recognised as translanguaging, but likely there – between at least Maltese and English, to varying degrees in schools (Camilleri Grima, 2013a; Panzavecchia & Little, 2020). This practice seems to be in direct response to perceived need (Camilleri Grima, 2013b; Mifsud & Farrugia, 2016) and also in recognition of the presence of migrant children (Caruana et al., 2019; Paris & Farrugia, 2019), who may have knowledge of both or neither official languages (e.g. see Falzon et al., 2012). One study also notes a more positive approach to (Maltese) dialect use in school classrooms. Camilleri Grima et al. (2013), drawing also on earlier studies of Gozitan dialects, note the tension between the high prestige of dialects and the academic challenges they sometimes present. Gozo is particularly noted, along with several villages in Malta, for consistent use of a local dialect, generally reinforced for primary school children attending village schools, where the dialect is usually used also in formal interaction. This is clearly considered a positive approach, even though it is noted that the dialect-speaking child must very quickly acquire the Standard Maltese variety especially for written work, if they are to progress. Rather than restrict dialect use, however, the authors follow the evidence in their data to suggest that a programme of language awareness and sensitivity could protect dialect use and encourage a pragmatic versatility in using dialects and standard Maltese where appropriate. The association of Maltese with an official status, and its (expected, though not always evident) use across public platforms (see Pace & Borg, 2017), has no doubt contributed to the interest in a general concern with its standardisation (see for example Caruana, 2011 for an overview, and The National Council for the Maltese Language at www.kunsilltalmalti.gov.mt/rizorsi?l=2 for key changes to standardised orthographic conventions). Such concern could also be driven by the translation industry, formally established to support the inclusion of Maltese as an official language within the European Union and responsible for a widely disseminated Maltese language magazine published by the European Commission.3 The persistent drive to encourage more widely disseminated written Maltese is reaping some benefits evident in the increase in Maltese literature, once occupying an acutely niche market, but now much more widely enjoyed (e.g. see Vassallo, 2013), as indicated in the fairly healthy local publishing industry. This in turn might start to address the concerns of a lack of visibility for Maltese across different media platforms and public spaces. The encouragement of written Maltese is considered particularly relevant in the context of online chat and social media platforms, where again, there is evidence of multilingual behaviour (Gatt, 2017; Brincat & Caruana, 2011). The creative flouting of standardised spelling practice has inevitably caused concern amongst language teachers, but following investigation into the effects of hours spent in online chat on spelling ability, Vella (2014) nevertheless suggests the need for further investigation as “the relationship between spelling and chatting is not as straightforward as some may expect” (Vella, 2014, p. 337), with the same study illustrating the wide-ranging use of non-standard spelling (in chat) underlining broader phonological awareness. 572
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Conclusions This short chapter provides an overview of some overarching themes currently investigated in sociolinguistic scholarship in Malta and Gozo. The tensions between contact situations and the preservation of distinct varieties has generated interest in both areas, as have those between standardised practice, pluricentric multilingualism and variability within the context of language planning strategies. However, they just skim the surface of a lively linguistic context.
Notes 1 A much-anticipated papal visit in 2022 included prayers in a televised service in Italian, Arabic, Polish, Malayalam and Tagalog. 2 Integration = Belonging: Migrant Integration Strategy & Action Plan, Vision 2020, Malta, Valletta, 2017, and A Language Policy for the Early Years in Malta and Gozo, Malta, Floriana, 2016. 3 L-Aċċent: https://ec.europa.eu/translation/maltese/magazine/mt_magazine_en.htm
References Assimakopoulos, S., & Vella Muskat, R. (2018). Xenophobic and Homophobic Attitudes in Online News Portal Comments in Malta. https://doi.org/10.7423/XJENZA.2018.1.04 Azzopardi-Alexander, M. (2011). The vowel system of Xlukkajr and Naduri. In S. Caruana, R. Fabri, & T. Stolz (Eds.), Variation and change: The dynamics of Maltese in space, time and society (pp. 235–253). Akademie Verlag. Azzopardi-Alexander, M. (2016). Language profiling: The weaving of Maltese and English in Maltese children’s conversations. In G. Puech & B. Saade (Eds.), Shifts and patterns in Maltese (Vol. 19, pp. 331– 385). De Gruyter Mouton. Azzopardi-Alexander, M. (2017). The phonetic study of speakers along the Maltese-English continuum. In B. Saade & M. Tosco (Eds.), Advances in Maltese linguistics (pp. 193–223). De Gruyter Mouton. Azzopardi-Alexander, M. (2018). Maltese Sign language: Parallel interwoven journeys of the Deaf community and the researchers. In P. Paggio & A. Gatt (Eds.), The languages of Malta (pp. 271–292). Language Science Press. Bonnici, L. M. (2010). Variation in Maltese English: the interplay of the local and the global in an emerging postcolonial variety [PhD dissertation, University of California]. Borg, A. (2011). Lectal variation in Maltese. In S. Caruana, R. Fabri, & T. Stolz (Eds.), Variation and change. the dynamics of maltese in space, time and society (pp. 11–31). Akademie Verlag. Borg, A., Caruana, S., & Vella, A. (Eds.). (2014). Perspectives on Maltese linguistics. De Gruyter, Inc. Brincat, G. (2011). Maltese and other languages: A linguistic history of Malta. Midsea Books. Brincat, L., & Caruana, S. (2011). Il-Malti Mgħaġġel: Maltese in computer-mediated chat conversations. In S. Caruana, R. Fabri, & T. Stolz (Eds.), Variation and chane. the dynamics of maltese in space, time and society (pp. 65–88). Akademie Verlag. Buttigieg, S. C., Agius, K., Pace, A., & Cassar, M. (2018). The integration of immigrant nurses at the workplace in Malta: A case study. International Journal of Migration, Health, and Social Care, 14(3), 269–289. Camilleri Grima, A. (2011). Giving compliments in Maltese. In S. Caruana, R. Fabri, & T. Stolz (Eds.), Variation and change. the dynamics of Maltese in space, time and society (pp. 45–64). Akademie Verlag. Camilleri Grima, A. (2013a). Challenging code-switching in Malta. Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée, XVIII(2), 45. Camilleri Grima, A. (2013b). A select review of bilingualism in education in Malta. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(5), 553–569. Camilleri Grima, A. (2020). What’s in a house name? Student-teachers’ dialogic encounters with multilingual texts in the environment. Language Awareness, 29(3–4), 199–219. Camilleri Grima, A., Buttigieg, L., & Xerri, J. (2013). Gozitan dialects in the classroom and language awareness for learner empowerment. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(5), 589–601. Caruana, S. (2011). Bilingualism and language policy in Malta. In E. Miola & P. Ramat (Eds.), Language contact and language decay. socio-political and linguistic perspectives. IUSS, Pavia.
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Sarah Grech Caruana, S., & Mori, L. (2021). Rethinking Maltese English as a continuum of sociolinguistic continua through evaluations of written and oral prompts. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English, 42(3), 245–272. Caruana, S., Fabri, R., & Stolz, T. (Eds.), (2011). Variation and change: The dynamics of Maltese in space, time and society. Akademie Verlag. Caruana, S., & Santipolo, M. (2021). In touch with reality or wishful thinking? Reflections on language policies and planning in multilingual contexts. In M. D’Angelo & M. Ožbot (Eds.), Lingue, testi e discorsi. studi in onore di paola desideri (pp. 135–154). Franco Cesati Editore. Caruana, S., Vassallo Gauci, P., & Scaglione, S. (2019). Multilingualism and the inclusion of migrant learners in Maltese schools. University of Malta. Comrie, B., Fabri, R., Hume, E., Mifsud, M., Stolz, T., & Vanhove, M. (Eds.). (2009). Introducing maltese linguistics: Selected papers from the 1st international conference on Maltese linguistics, Bremen, 18–20 October, 2007. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Cremona, M., Assimakopoulos, S., & Vella, A. (2017). The expression of politeness in a bilingual setting: Exploring the case of Maltese English. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 21(4), 767–788. Fabri, R. (2010). Maltese. Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 88(3), 791–816. https://doi.org/10.3406/ rbph.2010.7804 Falzon, N., Pisani, M., & Cauchi, A. (2012). Integration in education of third country nationals. Foundation for Educational Services. Farrugia, R. (2016). Analizi akustika u komparattiva ta’ zewg djaletti Ghawdxin [L-Universita’ ta’ Malta]. Frendo, R. (2018). Perception versus performance: a study on attitudes towards, and performance in Maltese and English. Junior college multi-disciplinary conference. breaking barriers : annual conference 2018, Malta (pp. 343–352). Gatt, A. (2017). Laboratorju tal-lingwi: Il-Malti, it-teknologija u l-mezzi socjali. Leħen il-Malti, 36, 101–114. Grech, S. (2015). Variation in English: perception and patterns in the identification of Maltese English [University of Malta, Institute of Linguistics]. Grech, S., & Vella, A. (2018). Rhythm in Maltese English. In P. Paggio & A. Gatt (Eds.), The languages of Malta (pp. 203–223). Language Science Press. Hilbert, M., & Krug, M. (2020). Maltese English. In The electronic world atlas of varieties of English (pp. 653–668). De Gruyter. Il-Kunsill Nazzjonali tal-Ilsien Malti, & Id-Dipartiment tal-Malti. (2021). The State of the Maltese language national survey. National Statistics Office. http://www.kunsilltalmalti.gov.mt/news-details?nwid=223&c tid=19&ctref=kollaborazzjoni Krug, M., & Sönning, L. (2018). Language change in Maltese English: The influence of age and parental languages. In P. Paggio & A. Gatt (Eds.), The languages of Malta (Vol. 18, pp. 247–270). Language Science Press. Mifsud, J., & Farrugia, J. (2016). Language choice for science education: Policy and practice. The Curriculum Journal, 28(1), 1–22. Pace, T., & Borg, A. (2017). The status of Maltese in national language-related legislation and implications for its use. Journal of Language and Law, 67, 70–85. Panzavecchia, M., & Little, S. (2020). The language of learning: Maltese teachers’ views on bilingual and multilingual primary classrooms. EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages 7(1), 108–123. Paris, A., & Farrugia, M. T. (2019). Embracing multilingualism in Maltese schools: From bilingual to multilingual pedagogy. Cahiers Internationaux de Sociolinguistique, 2(16), 117. Schembri, N. (2018). On the characterisation of Maltese English: An erroranalysis perspective based on nominal structures in Maltese university student texts. In P. Paggio & A. Gatt (Eds.), The languages of Malta (pp. 225–246). Language Science Press. Sciriha, L., & Vassallo, M. (2001). Malta: a linguistic landscape.[28] Sciriha, L., & Vassallo, M. (2015). Insular Malta: Self-expression of linguistic identity through public signs. In R. Heimrath & A. Kremer (Eds.), Insularity: Small worlds in linguistic and cultural perspectives (pp. 123–135). Konigshausen & Neumann.
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Sociolinguistics in Malta Spagnol, M., & Spiteri, A. (2013). Termini mediċi popolari. Id-Dipartiment tal-Ilsien Malti tal-Kummissjoni Ewropea. Thusat, J., Anderson, E., Davis, S., Ferris, M., Javed, A., Laughlin, A., McFarland, C., Sangsiri, R., Sinclair, J., Vastalo, V., Whelan, W., & Wrubel, J. (2009). Maltese English and the nativization phase of the dynamic model. English Today, 25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078409000157 Vassallo, C. (2013). Keep to the Local or Aim for the Global? Issues at the borders of a minority language. www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/26237 Vella, A. (2013). Languages and language varieties in Malta. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(5), 532–552. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2012.716812 Vella, A., Fabri, R., Spagnol, M., & Baldacchino, A. (2020). What did the past sound like? www.um.edu.mt/ library/oar/handle/123456789/67204 Vella, L. L. (2014). Language used in Internet chatting and its effect on spelling. In A. Borg, S. Caruana, & A. Vella (Eds.), Perspectives on Maltese linguistics (Vol. 14, pp. 319–340). Akademie Verlag.
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50 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE Miklós Kontra, Marián Sloboda, Jiří Nekvapil and Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak
Introduction In his Historical Atlas of East Central Europe, Magocsi (1993, p. ix) defined “East Central Europe” as the region between the eastern frontier of German- and Italian-speaking peoples on the west, and the political borders of the former Soviet Union on the east. This territory is now divided between Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic (or Czechia), and Poland. Soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain, in 1991, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland formed an alliance called the Visegrád Group, which also became known as the Visegrád Four (V4) countries after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into Czechia and Slovakia in 1993. These former member states of the Warsaw Pact are now members of NATO, and, on 1 May 2004, they became member states of the European Union. Sociolinguistics in the post-1960 Anglo-American sense did not have an easy ride in the Soviet satellite countries of East Central Europe (see Harlig & Pléh, 1995). Nevertheless, Trudgill (2000) in his review of this book recognized “a number of thriving indigenous eastern European sociolinguistic traditions prior to 1989” (p. 190). This chapter concentrates on sociolinguistics in the four East Central European countries – Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic (Czechia), and Poland – in their regional contexts.1
Pluricentricity The borders of the countries of East Central Europe were established after WWI along other than linguistic lines. Accordingly, significant populations of the speakers of local languages found themselves outside the territory of the state in which the language became official. Hungarian as a pluricentric language is analyzed in Vančo et al. (2020) by authors living in Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine, Rumania, and Slovenia. Slovak as a pluricentric language was first analyzed by Dudok (2002) with respect to a “half-center” for Slovak in Vojvodina, Serbia, and the traditional Slovak-speaking localities in Hungary and Rumania. Rusyn, a stateless language is analyzed by Kushko (2007) as a pluricentric language with four variants of the standard variety in Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, and Serbia; see also Magocsi (2018) for a recent analysis. DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-56 576
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Hungary and Hungarian abroad In the third decade of the 21st century, about one in four native speakers of Hungarian live outside Hungary (see Tóth, 2018). Genetically a Uralic language, Hungarian is unrelated to German, Rumanian, and the Slavic languages it has been in contact with since the Hungarian Conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 895. For a millennium prior to WWI, historic Hungary extended over the entire central Danubian Basin, with a largely multilingual and multiethnic population. Following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Peace Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Hungary lost about two-thirds of her territory and more than half of her population to Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Austria, and millions of ethnic Hungarians became citizens of another state overnight. According to the census of 2011, Hungarian is the mother tongue of all but 1.5% of Hungary’s total population of 9,937,000. Among L1 speakers of Hungarian must be counted the indigenous Hungarian national minorities in Slovakia (458,000), Ukraine (141,000), Rumania (1,216,000), Serbia (251,000), Croatia (8,000), Slovenia (4,000), and Burgenland, Austria (10,000). In the 21st century, indigenous Hungarians belong to one cultural nation and eight political nations. Compared to the previous censuses (in 2001), these minorities decreased by more than 10% in most neighboring countries. In 2011, L2 speakers of Hungarian in Hungary included 54,339 people who claimed Gypsy or Boyash (an archaic dialect of Rumanian) as their mother tongue, 38,248 who claimed German, 13,716 who claimed Croatian, 9,888 who claimed Slovak, 13,886 who claimed Rumanian, 3,708 who claimed Serbian, and 1,723 who claimed Slovene. For a recent survey of research in the Carpathian Basin, see Kontra (2022).
Sociolinguistic stratification and intralingual linguicism2 The first serious study of the social stratification of Hungarian in Hungary (see Kontra et al., 2010, pp. 360–361) was carried out when the communist regime fell in 1988, see Cseresnyési (2005) for a review in English and Kontra (2006). One remarkable finding of the study is that Hungarian language cultivators and schoolteachers promulgate a set of rules adhered to by only 8% of the country’s adult population, even when they are on their best linguistic behavior, as they are when answering questions on linguistic correctness posed by a social scientist. The oral sentence completion data reveal that Hungarian language cultivators and schoolteachers strive to change the speechways of two-thirds of the country’s population. Kontra (2018) believes that this serious linguistic discrimination in education could at least be reduced by changing pre-service teacher education, promulgating additive, rather than subtractive, language pedagogy. Fehér (2020) is a useful investigation of developing linguistic prestige of the standard vs. local dialect varieties in bidialectal kindergarteners.
Urban dialectology Based on Labov (1984), the Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview project ran from 1985 through 2010. A comprehensive volume was published in 2021 (Kontra & Borbély, Eds.); see also Kontra and Vargha (2014). Another similar project was conducted in 2012–2016 in the city of Szeged with 165 respondents (370 hours of recordings); see Németh et al. (2015). The third project to mention is The Budapest University Dormitory Corpus (http://bekk.elte.hu/index.php/in-english/); see Bodó et al. (2019) for an insightful analysis of men’s talk in Hungarian university dormitories. Historical sociolinguistic studies have had a slow start in Hungary. First, Németh (2008) must be mentioned, a study of variation and change in the 18th-century Hungarian used in the city of
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Szeged. Dömötör et al. (2021) is a recent collection of papers on variation and change in 16th- to 18th-century Hungarian. Computerized Hungarian dialect atlases (see, e.g., Vargha, 2018, and Presinszky, 2020) embrace ever larger Hungarian-populated regions in the Carpathian Basin.
Code-switching Janurik (2017) provides a structural analysis of intrasentential code-switching between the Uralic language Erzya and Russian. Kovács (2018) is an optimality-theoretical analysis of Hungarian‒English code-switching in North Carolina, USA. Németh (2010) examines the patterns and evaluation of German‒Hungarian code-switching among dialect speakers of German shifting to Hungarian.
Romani In research on Romani, Szalai (2014) analyzed ideologies of social differentiation in Transylvanian Gabor Roma communities, while Kádár and Szalai (2020) provided a case study of ritual cursing as a form of teasing in Romani.
Slang Almost all Hungarian research on slang has been published in Hungarian, with the exception of Fenyvesi (2001) in Russian, Kis (2006) in English, and Szabó (2004) in French.
Hungarian language contact outside Hungary Despite the fact that millions of indigenous Hungarians have lived in daily contact with Slovak, Rumanian, Serbian, and other languages in the neighboring countries since 1920, Hungarian contact linguistics in the modern sense of the word began only around the fall of the communist regime in the late 1980s. (The only exception to this generalization is Gal, 1979.) In the mid1990s, The Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary project was launched by linguists in Hungary and the neighboring countries. A quota sample was used (N=739) with a control group in Hungary (N=107).3 Questionnaire data were systematically gathered in a replicable fashion to answer such questions (see Kontra et al., 2010, p. 361), which were not even asked before the 1990s, let alone answered. Based on data from this project, Kontra’s (2001) statistical analyses of 24 variables provided substantial empirical verification of Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) two crucial parameters of intensity of contact in a borrowing situation: time and level of bilingualism. He showed that the 250 years of contact between Hungarian and Serbian has resulted in much more limited contact effects than the thousand-year-old contact of Hungarian with the northern Slavic languages, Slovak and Ukrainian. In a book edited by Fenyvesi (2005), seven chapters detail the contact varieties in the neighboring states, one each Hungarian in the USA and Australia, and two chapters (by Sarah Grey Thomason and Casper de Groot) summarize the typological and theoretical aspects of contact-induced change in Hungarian. For more recent studies and reviews of Hungarian in Transylvania (Rumania) see Némethy (2015) and Biró and Laihonen (2021); on Hungarian in Austria and Slovenia see Laakso et al. (2016); on Hungarian in Slovakia see several studies in Issue 1 of Hungarian Studies Volume 34
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(2020); and on variation in the Hungarian used in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, see Csernicskó and Fenyvesi (2012).
The Csángós In Trudgill’s words (2003, pp. 32–33), the Csángós are a Hungarian or “Hungarian”-speaking minority in Moldavia in eastern Rumania. They are a mostly ignored linguistic minority rapidly going through a process of language shift to Romanian and who are distinguished from other Romanians by their poverty, isolation and Catholicism. Romanian governments have sometimes denied their Hungarianness. Now the Csángós are faced with the reverse kind of Ausbau problem. Since 1989, Hungarian official bodies have been concerned to “save the Csángós”. They assume that Csángós are Hungarian-speakers and that young people will benefit from being offered education in Hungary or Transylvania. There is, however, too much Abstand for this to work easily. Csángó is also widely regarded in Hungary as “corrupt Hungarian”, which gives the Csángós an additional reason to switch to Romanian. Thanks to a number of fairly recent studies, several of them in English, the Csángós and their linguistic plight are better known today. Sándor (2005), Tánczos (2012), and Laihonen et al. (2020) are useful overviews, while Bodó and Fazakas (2018) is an extremely insightful analysis of authenticity (or authentic language) in a Csángó revitalization program directed from Hungary.
Language policy and rights Language policy analyses loom large in Hungarian sociolinguistics. In Hungary, Kontra has been calling attention for decades to the linguistic genocide of those Roma whose mother tongue is not Hungarian but Romani or Boyash (over 50,000 people according to census data). The mother tongues of these people are invisibilized by the Hungarian Census, which appears to be the purposeful policy of Hungarian governments for over two decades. The recent spread of English in Hungary has been analyzed by Kontra, who noted that “in Hungary, passivity and incompetence in dealing with language policy can be successfully sold as an apparent ‘fightback’ against the spread of English”, and this “helps the insidious expansion of English due to market forces and does so in a way that does not directly criticize the forces behind its spread” (2016, p. 240). Benő and Péntek (2016) is a detailed review of language policy and ideologies concerning Hungarians in Rumania. The Linguistic Human Rights plight of Hungarians in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, perhaps the worst example of linguistic genocide in education in present-day Europe, is analyzed by Csernicskó and Kontra (2023). For an example of administratively gerrymandering a compact Hungarian territory in order to reduce language rights in Slovakia, see Kontra (2011, pp. 51–52). Orosz (2012) is a rich quadrilingual (Hungarian, English, French, and Slovak) history of language rights in Slovakia between 1918 and 2012. For a brief review of Szilágyi’s highly original theoretical and practical propositions (based on universal language rights rather than minority rights) to solve the language rights problems of all the linguistic minorities in Rumania, see Kontra et al. (2010, pp. 362–363).
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Hungarian language contact inside Hungary Bartha and Borbély (2006) conducted truly pioneering research on six linguistic minorities in Hungary: Boyash, German, Romani, Rumanian, Serbian, and Slovak. A pioneering translanguaging education program for Romani-speaking school children has been conducted by Heltai (2020). Also important is Csizér and Kontra’s (2020) paper on deaf and hard-of-hearing learners’ motivation to learn English in Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Borbély (2014) is a monumental Hungarian monograph on variation and change in bilingual communities in Hungary, which provides a Sustainable Bilingualism Model (SBM) based on longitudinal and comparative analyses carried out in Hungary’s six national minorities. Also relevant are the author’s papers on language shift and the SBM (Borbély, 2015).
Slovakia Slovakia with its population of 5.5 million is smaller than its neighbors: Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Ukraine. Unequal relations with Hungarians and with Czechs, whose language is mutually intelligible with Slovak, are major incentives for sociolinguistics in Slovakia. Another incentive is the country’s internal heterogeneity (the population consists of 82% Slovak, 8.5% Hungarian, 2% Romani, and 2% Rusyn, Czech, and other mother-tongue speakers; 5.5% were undocumented in the 2021 census). A third incentive comes from fundamental political changes: regime change after the fall of communist rule in 1989 and the country’s 1993 independence after the break-up of Czechoslovakia (on sociolinguistic aspects of this, see Sloboda et al., 2018). An important feature of sociolinguistics in Slovakia is that it has been mobilized and is effective in addressing practical issues of language policy (see more later in the chapter).
Research traditions and institutionalization Sociolinguistics in Slovakia draws primarily on domestic and Czech traditions. Traditional dialectology, particularly its practice of fieldwork in rural areas, is one of them. A decisive impetus for sociolinguistic research thus came with post–WWII urbanization resulting in the expansion of the standard variety of Slovak within the population, which raised the question of the form of the standard language in use. In 1963–65, leading Slovak linguist Eugen Pauliny organized nationwide research into the spoken form of standard Slovak in cities (Pauliny, 1964). Since the purpose of the research was to serve further cultivation of the standard language, the social differentiation of respondents was carried out only according to their level of education and the need to use the standard variety at work. The research was carried out by linguists and teachers of various theoretical backgrounds, so the implementation of fieldwork and the interpretation of results were sociolinguistically oriented to varying degrees. The outcomes and the discussion thereof were merely mimeographed in 1972 (printed by Ondrejovič only in 2007) and this line of research has been virtually discontinued. A second tradition of Slovak sociolinguistics is represented by the functional structuralism of the Prague Linguistic Circle, which evinced sociolinguistic interests from its inception (Neustupný, 1999). These have mainly taken the form of concerns with the theory of standard language and of language cultivation which have also developed in Slovakia (especially Kačala, 1979). An important theoretical postulate of the Prague School favorable to the sociolinguistic approach is that language codification should record the language norms actually operating among speakers themselves. This created the need to examine genuine language use and awareness in order to compare these with the language’s current codification. 580
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Sociolinguistics as such developed in Slovakia only in the 1980s in connection with linguists’ efforts to learn about the population’s competence in the standard variety and their evaluation of individual variants (Šikra, 1991). Not everyone was sympathetic to the sociolinguistic approach in the 1990s, since the hierarchy of codification criteria (custom vs. systemicity) was still unresolved, which led to the split in the linguistic community between “sociolinguists” (prioritizing custom) and “normativists” (prioritizing systemicity) (Bosák, 1995). However, sociolinguistics has gradually gained ground and it is now a normal part of linguistic research in Slovakia. University programs in Slovak studies include courses on sociolinguistics, even though there still is only one textbook, or rather, a teachers’ guide in Slovak (Tóth, 2019). Its rationale is to complement textbooks of Western provenance by suggesting sociolinguistic studies on the Slovak context as readings for university courses in Slovakia (ibid.). At the major research institution in the country, the Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, a department of “social linguistics” was established in 2017. Other centers of sociolinguistic research are located at the universities in Prešov (with advanced research into social registers, such as child-directed speech, Slančová, 2018), in Banská Bystrica (study of slang and of urban language, starting with seminal work by Vladimír Patráš, partly available in English in Patráš, 2016), and in Nitra (sociolinguistics of Slovak–Hungarian contact, Vančo, 2011, 2012). These centers are located in several regions of Slovakia, which gave hope to the main proponent of sociolinguistics in Slovakia, Slavomír Ondrejovič (esp. Ondrejovič, 2008), that the nationwide research of the 1960s could be replicated. As of 2022 this idea has not materialized, but Ondrejovič has successfully launched a sociolinguistic book series, Sociolinguistica Slovaca. The themes of the volumes of Sociolinguistica Slovaca emblematically capture the shifts of attention in sociolinguistic research in Slovakia over the years. The first, 1995 volume presents previous research that concentrated on language awareness and attitudes, on sociolinguistic situations of Slovakia’s regions, and on Slovak in contact with other languages. The second volume deals with areal linguistics; the third and the fourth reflect the linguistic, communicative, and language-policy effects of post-communist transition on Slovak and on interlingual relations. While the fifth and sixth volumes continue to deal with the traditional research topic of the urban language, the seventh and eighth volumes move on to more recent issues, such as discourse and its (inter-)cultural, political, and ideological contingencies (a full list and online versions of the volumes are available at www.juls.savba.sk/sociolinguistica_slovaca.html).
Language variation In Slovakia, research on language variation has not operated with the Labovian classification of linguistic variables. Possibly thanks to the Zeitgeist, however, Jozef Muránsky used a very similar approach as early as 1965 (Muránsky, 2007 [1965]). Muránsky (1971) represents a quantitative study of phonetic variation between the alveolar [l] vs. palatal [ʎ] in eight cities. It is based on recordings of two unrehearsed ten-minute narratives from each respondent representing one of three “social strata” defined by educational level and the need for standard language use in the workplace. Muránsky subsequently published a series of articles on individual cities and towns that considered further phonological variables, apparently without being inspired by Labov and with reference only to the methodology of Pauliny (1964). Lanstyák (2002) is a rare variationist study inspired by Western sociolinguistics on standard vs. non-standard variants among Hungarian schoolchildren in Slovakia and Hungary. It used sentence completion tasks in the framework of a questionnaire survey, which is the usual method applied to the study of language variation in Slovak sociolinguistics. 581
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Language contact and multilingualism Czech borrowings and attitudes to Czech have received continuous attention due to their importance for Slovak national identity and language cultivation (Dolník, 2010, pp. 74–93). Nábělková (2016) is an extensive study on the linguistic boundary between Czech and Slovak. Slovak outside Slovakia received book-length treatments in Nábělková (2008) on Czechia and in Uhrinová (2011) on Hungary, while Dudok (2008) presents a generalizing and theory-building approach. Hungarian in Slovakia is a major theme in Slovak sociolinguistics. It is studied by Slovak authors, who attend more to Hungarian–Slovak relations (Dolník & Pilecký, 2012; György, 2017; Satinská, 2016), as well as by Slovakia-based Hungarian authors, who concentrate on language minority issues (for a representative volume, see Szabómihály & Lanstyák, 2011; in English, Vančo, 2011, 2012). The topics covered include features of Hungarian in Slovakia, code-switching, and language maintenance and shift; but as a result of Slovak–Hungarian tensions in the post-independence period, attention is directed mostly at language policy implementation, the exercise of language rights, language use in schools and in administration, personal and place names in official contexts, as well as terminology and translation issues (for recent treatment of these issues in English, see Misad, 2020; Vančo et al., 2020). More recently, linguistic landscapes in bilingual localities have started to attract attention (see Szabómihály, 2020 and references therein). There are far fewer studies on Romani, Rusyn, and other minority languages (see, e.g., Lanstyák et al., 2017).
Language standardization, policy and planning Slovak language standardization and cultivation has traditionally been a central theme in Slovak sociolinguistics, as mentioned earlier. An original thinker in this area is Juraj Dolník, who, building on philosophy and cultural studies, has theorized the concepts of the “real” vs. “ideal”, “normal”, “natural”, and “foreign”, which he and other scholars apply to Slovaks’ relationship to Czech and Hungarian, to migrants, as well as to language standardization and cultivation, a theory of which was synthesized in Dolník (2010). Historical sociolinguistics of standard Slovak has been developed by Gabriela Múcsková (e.g., Múcsková, 2017). Official language policies have been discussed not only in connection with Hungarian, but also with reference to the codified form of Slovak required by law for public communication. Language management in actual communicative practice has been considered mostly in relation to Hungarian (for an overview of minority language problems, see Lanstyák & Szabómihály, 2009). Language Management Theory (Nekvapil & Sherman, 2015) has not only been applied in the Slovak context, but István Lanstyák has also substantially developed it by integrating work from general theories of planning and of problem management (Lanstyák, 2018, 2021). A 2018–2022 project under his leadership has brought together research on Slovak, Hungarian, Romani, and German (Lanstyák et al., 2022).
Language ideologies The Slovak sociolinguistic community has been receptive to the linguistic anthropological concept of language ideologies (Lanstyák et al., 2017), possibly thanks to the traditional interest in language awareness. Lanstyák (in Lanstyák et al., 2017, pp. 280–307) has worked out an analytically useful catalogue of language ideologies.
Discourse analysis In addition to the strong tradition of functional stylistics related to the Prague School, some work has been carried out from other perspectives, e.g., on politeness in relation to globalization 582
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and social change (Ferenčík, 2018, 2020) and on gender-specific discourse (Dolník et al., 2015; Orgoňová & Piatková, 2015).
Language and gender As elsewhere in Europe, gender-sensitive language use has become an important research topic in Slovakia too. Additionally, the (non-)use of female forms of surnames according to the morphology of Slovak and Hungarian has become the subject of scholarly debate (Molnár Satinská & Valentová, 2016).
Czech Republic (Czechia) History, bibliographies, institutions A history and a brief description of sociolinguistics in Czechia are available in Nekvapil and Ondrejovič (1993) and Nekvapil (2008, 2012). Sociolinguistics in Czechia is understood broadly, as evidenced by the extensive bibliography published annually in the international yearbook of European sociolinguistics (Kaderka, 2007–2019). The broad concept of sociolinguistics aspires to interdisciplinary cooperation, especially with sociologists: as a result, sociolinguistic contributions also appear in the Czech Sociological Review, starting with the special issue on Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of Language (Nekvapil, 2002). Sociolinguistics is now an established field in Czechia: it is a compulsory element of the bachelor’s degree in linguistics at Charles University, and it has finally established a foothold in the Czech Academy of Sciences. Since 2019 a Department of Stylistics and Sociolinguistics has existed in the Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences; the coexistence of (functional) stylistics and sociolinguistics in a single department is not surprising – it is in the spirit of the intellectual traditions of the Prague School, which is still very much alive in Czechia (Kraus, 1971/1986; Hoffmannová et al., 2016). The Language Management Research Group, based at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, contributes significantly to the development of sociolinguistics in Czechia through its regular sociolinguistics seminar. The group also administers a multilingual website , where its Working Papers in Language Management are available (e.g., Dovalil, 2018; Sloboda, 2020).
Book series Sociolinguistics in Czechia has two book series at its disposal. The first one, Sociolingvistická edice: Jazyk, společnost, interakce (Sociolinguistics Series: Language, Society, Interaction), appears in Czech in the Prague publishing house NLN. Its scope is wide, ranging from “language autobiography” (Vasiljev, 2011) to an overview of theories of language interaction (Auer, 2014/2019), and the analysis of spoken language (Müllerová, 2022). Its sister book series, Prague Papers on Language, Society and Interaction, published by Peter Lang (Berlin), appears in English. This series comprises mainly studies on language management (e.g., Fairbrother et al., 2018; Nekula et al., 2022), but also gives room to works devoted to the language situation in Czechia (Wilson, 2010) and in the wider Central and East European region (Sloboda et al., 2016).
De-provincialization A striking feature of contemporary sociolinguistics in Czechia is its internationalization. This process, which has taken place over the last 10 or 15 years, manifests itself mainly through multiple 583
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joint publications of Czech and international sociolinguists. This is evident from a number of titles in the aforementioned edition of Prague Papers on Language, Society and Interaction, but also from individual titles outside this series (Smakman et al., 2022), or from numerous special issues of international journals (e.g., Marriott & Nekvapil, 2012; Nekvapil & Sherman, 2015). Exceptionally, internationalization may not take place on the basis of English (Podhorná-Polická, 2015). A high degree of internationalization can also be seen in conferences, most visibly in the organization of the regular bi-annual International Language Management Symposium, where the Czech experts also act as co-organizers of symposia held abroad (see recent symposia in Regensburg, Kyoto, and Zagreb). The organization of the Third International Conference on Sociolinguistics, whose third iteration has moved from Budapest to Prague, is also part of this trend.
Thematic areas Variationist studies Variationist studies are still rare, and J. Wilson’s research dealing with the linguistic behavior of speakers from Moravia living in Prague (Wilson, 2010) has remained their most significant achievement in Czechia. In his more recent study, the author uses data from his previous research and investigates to what extent salience is a reliable predictor of second dialect acquisition (Wilson, 2018). In other research, Havlík and Wilson (2017) applied variationist methods to analyze the pronunciation of Czech loanwords in relation to age, education, sex, and regional background. The development of variationism in Czechia might be positively affected by Chromý (2017), whose work in some chapters has a textbook-like character, though the study itself is rather narrow in scope.
Discourse Discourse-based studies revealing the role of varied social aspects in communication are among favorite topics of empirical research and include studies inspired by conversation analysis and multimodality in conjunction with Bakhtinian and Prague School traditions (Čmejrková & Hoffmannová, 2011), or politeness research (Chejnová, 2015). Kaderka (2013) is an original theoretical study on the communicative situation which still awaits wider application. The concept of the dialogical network designed to study complex communication that typically occurs in mass and social media has gained international reach (Leudar & Nekvapil, 2022; Nekvapil et al., 2021).
Language management Internationally, studies on language management, that is “behavior toward language” both of individuals and institutions, have become the most prominent feature of sociolinguistics in Czechia, and Prague currently functions as a hub for Language Management Theory (LMT) worldwide. Nekvapil (2016) and Dovalil and Šichová (2017) provide general overviews of this field, while Sherman (2020a) reports on specificities of LMT as practiced in Central Europe. LMT is used as a framework for the analysis of multiple social areas, such as law (Dovalil, 2015), education (Sherman, 2020b), the family (Özörencik & Hromadová, 2018), or multinational companies (Nekvapil & Sherman, 2013); some studies also contribute to the development of LMT itself (Kopecký, 2014). However, management of the linguistic presentation of gender would deserve more research than has been conducted so far (see Valdrová, 2018). 584
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Standard languages, language cultivation, and slang Language standardization and cultivation, not only of Czech but also e.g., Romani (Červenka, 2014) have remained at the forefront. Recent developments in the theory of language cultivation in the vein of the Prague School are presented in the Croatian anthology edited by P. Vuković (2015). A major contribution to this field is the theory of language correctness (Beneš, 2020) drawing on the emic notion of correctness. Like LMT, the theory includes not only the macro level of institutions but also the micro level of particular interactions. In contrast to the traditional notion of language cultivation, the new theory strives to systematically employ social variables (Beneš, 2016). Also worth mentioning here are studies analyzing various kinds of slang (or argot), as these phenomena in Czechia are defined and perceived traditionally in opposition to the standard language (Podhorná-Polická, 2009; Radková & Rausová, 2015; Radková, 2016).
Multilingualism and superdiversity The presence of Slovak, Polish, German, and Romani continues to attract considerable attention (Nábělková, 2008, 2014; Bogoczová, 2018; Nekula, 2021; Kubaník, 2012, 2020) and recently this has also been true for Vietnamese (Sherman & Homoláč, 2017, 2021). A closely watched issue is the role and functions of English (Kaderka & Prošek, 2014). Most visibly, multilingualism stands out in the linguistic landscape, the analysis of which is gaining momentum (Sloboda, 2009; Sloboda et al., 2010; Marx & Nekula, 2015; Bermel & Knittl, 2018; Nekvapil, 2020). An original introduction to the current sociolinguistic situation is the extensive study by Sloboda (2016) who demonstrates how superdiversity manifests itself in Czechia, a country largely perceived as monolingual just a few decades ago. Nekvapil and Sherman (2018) deal with superdiversity in multinationals. Finally, Cope and Eckert (2016) provide valuable information on Czech sign language and Czech communities outside Czechia (in the USA, Rumania, and Russia).
Poland Polish sociolinguists have researched the process of transition from a society perceived as predominantly monolingual and linguistically homogeneous to one participating in global and translingual processes. Over the past 15 years, speaker attitudes and researchers’ orientations have become increasingly open to linguistic diversity and interest in variation.
National and ethnic diversity The past decade has witnessed a dynamic increase in population mobility and a resultant demographic diversification in Poland. This was already evident in the 2002 National Census, reflecting an array of nationalities and ethnic identities claimed by respondents (see Kontra et al., 2010, p. 366). The results of the latest edition of the Census, conducted in 2021, are being released in installments. Strikingly, the results published in April 2023 (on ethnic identities and languages) indicate that 98.4% of the Polish population claims Polish to be the language they use at home, and for as many as 94.3% Polish is the only language spoken at home (Wstępne wyniki NSP, 2023). However, it is obvious that in recent years Poland has been a receiving as well as a sending country for a large number of migrants. Increased geographical mobility has given many Polish people authentic and everyday experience of language contact. 585
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Language and migration dynamics Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004 marked the beginning of a migration surge. Polish speakers’ L1 came to coexist with other languages, and they discovered that bi- and multilingualism is the norm rather than the exception in the world at large. In particular, substantial migration to the UK and Ireland put many Polish people in direct contact with the English language or, rather, with many different Englishes that they had never heard of. Polish migrants became accustomed to situations of intense language contact and brought this experience back home – when visiting or upon their return – as a form of social remittance (see White, 2018a4). They also learned to have greater appreciation for the (linguistic) diversity in their home country (White, 2018b, p. 223). As inhabitants of “transnational social spaces”, today’s migrants – thanks to communication technologies, even without traveling – live in both the receiving and the sending societies. They bring back to their heritage society what may be dubbed as “(socio)linguistic remittances” (cf. White, 2018b, p. 225): exposure to multilingualism, experience of foreign language learning and of communicating across language and ethnic groups. The study of the use of Polish by Poles outside Poland is being taken up with increasing frequency. Polish sociolinguists, some based and educated abroad, have addressed topics directly related to Polish migrants. They studied not only the migrants’ L1 and its maintenance. NewlinŁukowicz (2015, 2016) investigated how Polish speakers’ ethnic identity and their L1 affects their adoption of regional features of English in migrant communities in New York City and in the UK (see also Drummond, 2012; Koźmińska, 2021; Koźmińska & Hua, 2021; Kędra et al., 2021).
Languages in Poland: varieties of Polish and minority languages The increased awareness of demographic and linguistic diversity has shifted the attention of ordinary speakers and linguists alike away from the prestigious standard toward non-standard varieties of Polish and other languages spoken in Poland. If Poles have always been convinced that (standard) Polish should be protected and treasured, many now also feel that it is time to focus on non-standard varieties as well as minority languages and languages that are marginalized, or even endangered. This orientation was tellingly reflected when, in 2016, the VIth World Congress of Polonists for the first time included a panel devoted to minority (and minoritized) languages in Poland,5 with Gerd Hentschel, Motoki Nomachi, Roland Marti, Ewa Michna, and Tomasz Wicherkiewicz invited as leading experts on the topic. Varieties of Polish include the languages of ethnic groups that have long inhabited Poland. They vary in size and status: from one officially recognized as a regional language (Kashubian in 20056), through others still striving for such status (e.g., Silesian), to very small ones which, therefore, get much scholarly attention as endangered varieties (e.g., Wymysorys).7 Wicherkiewicz (2018, 2021) has published on the minority language situation in Poland, Walkowiak and Wicherkiewicz (2019) on Lithuanian in Poland, Kamusella (2013, 2016) on Silesian, and Hornsby (2015, 2016) on Lemko. Also noteworthy is the research by Nicole Dołowy-Rybińska (on linguistic minorities in Poland), Pavlo Levchuk (on Ukrainian migrants’ trilingualism in Poland), Ewa Golachowska (on Polish in Belarus), and Anna Zielińska (on Polish–German bilingualism). More recently, since 2014 and particularly in 2022, Ukrainians have rapidly become by far the largest minority group in Poland as a consequence of a massive population influx, whose size is difficult to estimate (see Jarosz & Klaus, 2023). Since the onset of Russian military aggression in Ukraine in February 2022, over two million refugees have fled from Ukraine into neighboring Poland, joining an estimated two to three million immigrants who arrived in preceding years. 586
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Varieties of East Slavic, including Ukrainian, Russian, and the so-called mixed language surzhyk, have thus dramatically taken the lead among Poland’s minority languages. The data on home languages other than Polish spoken in Poland before the war in Ukraine have just been published as the preliminary 2021 census results (Wstępne wyniki NSP, 2023).
Weakening of the “cult of the norm” Despite enduring social concern for the standard language norm, the approach to the norm itself now seems relatively less rigid. This is apparent in dictionaries of “correct Polish”, where the labels assigned to some lexical variants (e.g., “permissible” [dopuszczalne]) suggest a more liberal attitude. On the whole, usage is defined in dictionaries and normative publications in terms of norma wzorcowa and norma użytkowa, which might roughly be translated as “ideal norm” and “everyday norm”.8 The “standard language question” has been less and less frequently the background for investigating varieties of Polish. We are now witnessing more of a balance between the pervasive power of prescriptivism and standard language ideology vs. the acknowledgment and appreciation of linguistic diversity.
Language and politics Poland’s political transition has turned its speech communities into a fascinating research ground to trace the linguistic processes that accompany the fundamental social transformations and ongoing political change. Ever since George Orwell’s term “Newspeak” came to public attention as aptly describing the realities of manipulation in communist Poland, researchers have been keen to spotlight how politics affects language, but also how politicians exploit language for their purposes. For instance, the current ruling coalition capitalized on the presidential election slogan dobra zmiana (lit. “good change”): this and numerous other catchphrases have been discussed by language experts (Kłosińska & Rusinek, 2020).
Language and gender studies One domain which has received much attention is the way language refers to gender identities. How to refer to and address women and men has in recent years become the subject of heated debate, engaging linguists and non-linguists alike, not only in the media but also in everyday conversations, thus raising the awareness of how language may have an impact on social relations (Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, 2019). The Polish language has been studied in the context of gender equity and, in particular, how its relatively complex system of grammatical gender provides for or, crucially, impedes the fair representation of people with reference to their gender identities (Pakuła et al., 2015; Małocha-Krupa, 2018; Szpyra-Kozłowska, 2019, 2021). Whether occasional or systematic use is made of feminine forms, these debates will contribute to the spread and impact of these forms, if only through raising awareness, for the sake of gender equality (see Formanowicz et al., 2015 on language and gender activism). However, discussions of the striking asymmetry in labels for men and women in the Polish language have to some extent overshadowed calls to represent gender as an array of identities rather than in binary terms (see Misiek, 2021).
Empirical studies of variation: conversational data and corpora With growing awareness of the relevance of language variation, Polish sociolinguists have taken up research beyond dialect documentation, i.e., recording local and at-risk varieties. Much 587
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sociolinguistic research is now solidly data-based, drawing from naturally occurring speech and corpora. Corpus studies on Polish were notably initiated in 2010 by the creation of the National Corpus of Polish (http://nkjp.pl, Przepiórkowski et al., 2012). Currently researchers draw on smaller, more specialized reference corpora as well as large monitor corpora such as Monco PL, a corpus of web-based Polish of well over seven billion words (in March 2022), which has quickly grown since 2010, and makes it possible to monitor current trends in usage9 (Pęzik, 2020). The spoken parts of the corpora are now being expanded. Linguists are also taking the opportunity to explore and digitize existing archives of recorded spoken language.10 Overall, researchers have come to appreciate how such databases of naturally occurring speech afford a more nuanced understanding of variation as a means by which speakers construct and reconstruct identities in particular situations.
Variationist sociolinguistic studies: language change Even though much research on language in context can be traced back to the relatively strong tradition of (rural and urban) dialectology, current research efforts have mostly been focused on documenting local dialects or varieties used in different communities of practice. On the other hand, not enough attention has been given to the study of variability with a view to capturing ongoing language change. A great deal of such work on Polish has been carried out by linguists educated (whether in Poland or abroad) in the spirit of empirical inquiry into highly heterogeneous sociolinguistic research areas. Łukasz Abramowicz’s dissertation (2008) on antepenultimate and penultimate stress in nouns of Greek and Latin origin (e.g., matemátyka), which made use of quantitative methods of variationist sociolinguistics, was completed at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of William Labov. Other significant variationist studies of Polish dialectology have been conducted by scholars who derive from English studies in Poland. For example, a team of sociophoneticians headed by Małgorzata Kul from the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, compiled in the years 2013–2017 a corpus of spoken Polish from the province of Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) (Kul et al., 2019; Kaźmierski et al., 2019).11
Publications Władysław Lubaś, who helped to introduce sociolinguistic thinking to Poland (inspired by the ideas of F. de Saussure and J. Baudouin de Courtenay), died in 2014, leaving as his legacy the journal Socjolingwistyka.12 Published since 1977, it was initially dedicated to language policy and urban dialectology, but has gradually come to encompass a multiplicity of topics on language in its social context, from an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective. In addition to the yearly bibliographies in Sociolinguistica, much research in sociolinguistics in Poland, as well as in Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia, is available via CEEOL (Central and Eastern European Online Library),13 providing access to academic e-journals and e-books in the humanities and social sciences from and about Central and Eastern Europe.
Acknowledgments Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak would like to thank Ronald Kim, Anne White, and Tomasz Wicherkiewicz for their valuable insights.
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Notes 1 Kontra wrote the piece on Hungarian sociolinguistics, Sloboda on Slovak, Nekvapil on Czech, and Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak on Polish sociolinguistics. 2 The term linguicism, first introduced by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, describes the processes and policies of linguistic discrimination or social discrimination between groups of people defined on the basis of language. Linguicism refers to the stigmatisation and (social, economic and political) marginalisation of speakers of non-standard varieties and minority languages. 3 The original fieldwork was carried out in 1995/96 in all the neighboring countries except Croatia (due to the Yugoslav Civil War). Fieldwork in Croatia was carried out in 2014 with a quota sample of 116 respondents and a control group of 97 persons in Hungary. Six volumes in Hungarian were published between 1998 and 2020. Fenyvesi (Ed. 2005) is the best collection of studies in English. 4 See: White (2018a, p. 230) referring to “the emerging literature on social remittances circulating between countries with regard to attitudes to diversity”. 5 The panel was called Języki regionalne i mniejszościowe: implikacje polityczne – kodyfikacja – aspekty strukturalne. 6 See: Act of 6 January 2005 on national and ethnic minorities and on the regional language [Ustawa z dnia 6 stycznia 2005 r. o mniejszościach narodowych i etnicznych oraz o języku regionalnym, Dz.U. z 2005 roku, nr 17, poz.141.] at http://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails. xsp?id=wdu20050170141. 7 See: Poland’s Linguistic Heritage – documentation base for endangered languages (Dziedzictwo językowe Rzeczypospolitej – Baza dokumentacji zagrożonych języków) at www.inne-jezyki.amu.edu.pl, a resource created by a team headed by Tomasz Wicherkiewicz of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. 8 Similarly, the Council for the Polish Language (Rada Języka Polskiego), an influential norm-setting institution, has been seen to be changing its pronouncements on many language issues over the last decades. For example, the Council issued two quite different statements on the use of feminine gender forms of nouns naming occupations and titles in 2012 and 2019, thus testifying to changes in both linguistic practices and social attitudes. 9 The Monco PL search functions are accessible at http://monco.frazeo.pl. 10 One fascinating ongoing project by Anna Majewska-Tworek and her colleagues (2020) juxtaposes current data collection standards with those of the 1980s. 11 The corpus contains partly annotated recordings (read sentences and interviews) and is accessible to researchers at (http://wa.amu.edu.pl/korpuswlkp/english). 12 https://socjolingwistyka.ijp.pan.pl/index.php/SOCJO 13 www.ceeol.com
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51 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN THE BALKANS Robert Greenberg
Any discussion of sociolinguistic issues in a region such as the Balkans must include a set of understandings regarding a definition of the Balkans and some historical perspectives on languages, peoples, nations, and states that have emerged in this often-volatile region of Europe. My purpose is not to repeat all that has been said about the term “Balkans,” which has evoked either images of exotic mountains with colorful and proud folk traditions, or, conversely, a place where ethnic groups are said in popular books and news reports to be perpetually in conflict. In the fields of linguistics and sociolinguistics, the term “Balkan” has been used regularly in connection with the Balkan speech territory or Sprachbund. This speech territory includes prominent Balkan languages and is cited as an example of areal linguistic phenomena, where languages of diverse origins came into contact and through this contact certain linguistic features spread among these languages in what have been called “Balkanisms.”1 These Balkan linguistic features are typical of Albanian, Arumanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian dialects, and Turkish. Numerous Balkan features have also spread northward into contiguous areas including northern and central Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Montenegro. While many scholars have focused on the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical commonalities of the Balkan languages, few have focused on comparative sociolinguistic evidence that could reveal broader Balkan commonalities or differences in the areas of language policy, language planning, and the attitudes towards linguistic minorities. This survey considers the main directions of research on the sociolinguistics of Balkan societies, including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia,2 Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia. Despite the diverse political, historical and cultural circumstances characteristic of the Balkan states, the sociolinguistic literature has been particularly strong in the areas of language and national identity, language planning and policy, and the status of minority languages and dialects. The last decades of the twentieth century and the early 2000s were marked by the demise of the multiethnic Yugoslav state and the emergence of seven less diverse successor states. Such nationalistinspired state building resulted in the emergence of independent states less tolerant of multiculturalism and multilingualism. Rather, more often the new polities have embraced nation-state models, where a founding primary nation enjoys an advantageous position in society in relation to minorities since this primary nation determines the official state language, official religion, or cultural identity. This nation-state model had been much the norm outside of the former Yugoslavia, especially in Albania, DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-57 598
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Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania. However, the internal Yugoslav borders that became new international boundaries have inadequately corresponded to the ethnic and linguistic boundaries, so that in the former Yugoslav territories old majority populations have become new minorities in the smaller less ethnically diverse states. After considering the main directions of sociolinguistic research on the Balkan countries, I provide my own observations on the state of regional and minority languages in the Balkans.
Overview of sociolinguistic research on the Balkans3 In this survey of the sociolinguistic literature on the Balkans, I consider two main time periods. The first is roughly from 1810 to 1989, and the second is the period from 1989 to 2021. In the first period, the countries of the Balkans emerge from the domination of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, gaining their independence during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. In the period between the end of World War I and the year 1989, the countries of the region consisted of Yugoslavia (Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes up to 1929), Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece. The official languages spoken in these countries included Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Macedonian (after 1944), Bulgarian, Albanian, Romanian, and Greek. Yugoslavia began disintegrating in the late 1980s, and by 2008 seven new countries and several new official languages emerged. The new countries included Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. The new official languages are known as Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian – all of which emerged from the once joint Serbo-Croatian language. During the first period, much of the sociolinguistic research focused on the role of language in forming national identity, the impact of Communist ideology on language planning and language policy, and the status of minority languages, such as the status of Albanian minorities in Greece (Tsitsipis & Elmendorf, 1983) or Arumanian speakers in Yugoslavia (Gołąb, 1984). The entire region with the exception of Greece was subject to a Communist or Socialist ideology between 1945 and 1989, which also impacted the kinds of sociolinguistic studies produced. The second period is far more complex, addressing the issues surrounding the new successor languages to Serbo-Croatian, and the role of language in affirming contested national identities. Here, I treat the main themes of sociolinguistic research in the Balkans, including language, nation-building/nationalism and identity, language planning and policy approaches, and issues of regional and minority languages and dialects. Admittedly, this survey is not exhaustive and has a strong focus on the Slavic-speaking parts of the Balkans.
Language, nation-building/nationalism Much of the sociolinguistic literature on the Balkan peoples (except the Greeks) before 1989 focused on the link between language and nation-building as the nations emerged from the domination of multi-ethnic and multilingual empires. For instance Auty (1958) focused on the roles of individuals in bringing about new linguistic standards, including Ljudevit Gaj in the Croatian lands; Birnbaum (1980) wrote about how language served as a unifying element in creating a joint Yugoslav state after 1918; and the volume The Slavic Literary Languages (1980) included work on Serbo-Croatian as a main language underpinning a joint Yugoslav state (Naylor, 1980), and the development of the other Slavic languages and nations of the region, including Slovene (Stankiewicz, 1980), Macedonian (Koneski, 1980), and Bulgarian (Pinto, 1980). Additional topics of interest at this time included the links between language and nationalism, such as in the development of a Macedonian language and nation (Friedman, 1975), or in Tito’s Yugoslavia (Magner, 1967; Spalatin, 1975, and Magner, 1988), and the vexed questions of how truly unified was the Serbo-Croatian language with its two equal and official variants (Naylor, 1978). 599
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The themes of language, identity, nationalism, and ethnic conflict became a significant focus of sociolinguists studying the Balkans after 1989. Much of this interest grew out of the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia and what many linguists – but not all – have seen as the disintegration of the joint Serbo-Croatian into four nationally inspired successor languages. I was among the linguists who devoted numerous articles and book chapters to this topic (Greenberg, 1999a, 1999b, 2001, 2017, 2019, and 2021) and a monograph to the topic (Greenberg, 2008). A broader “former Serbo-Croatian” perspective is also the subject of monographs by Gröschel (2009) and Kordić (2010). Sociolinguists have debated on whether or not the four successor languages from SerboCroatian (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian) should indeed be classified as separate languages. Kordić is of the view that given the mutual intelligibility of these languages and their similar phonological, morphological, and syntactic systems, they do not truly constitute separate languages. Gröschel broadly agreed with that view, believing the breakup of Serbo-Croatian was political rather than linguistic. My own view has been to concede that there are many examples in the world of languages that have emerged more for political reasons than linguistic ones, and I therefore do not contest the notion that the joint language has indeed splintered into the four ethnically and politically inspired new standards. Other views on the breakup of the joint language can be seen in works by Bugarski (2004) and Alexander (2006). The former considered that the Serbo-Croatian language had never been unified, and those who during Tito’s time considered it to be a single language were politically motivated. Alexander’s volume is a textbook of the Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian languages with additional notes designed to expose students to the complex sociolinguistic landscape of the former Serbo-Croatian speech territory and the need for students of the languages to choose the standard one they wish to learn and be consistent with usage of that standard. Other scholars of sociolinguistic studies have focused their attention largely on one of the successor languages. For Croatian, the most comprehensive work is by Langston and PetiStantić (2014) and Peti-Stantić (2008). One of the more prolific researchers on the language situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and especially the status of the Bosnian language is Vajzović (2004 and 2006). Her work on the Bosnian language and links to Bosnian or Bosniak identity are considered to be well balanced and with few nationalistic overtones. She recognized that three standards are official in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian), and expressed a view that the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina should attempt to be unified around a common language rather than divided by a principle of each ethno-national group opting to have its own distinctive language. More on the Bosnian language itself can be seen in my own work in Greenberg (2008), especially Chapter 6, which describes descriptivist and prescriptivist approaches to the standardization of a new Bosnian standard language. For Montenegrin, perhaps the most contested of the successor languages, linguists within Montenegro are divided about the legitimacy of a separate Montenegrin language, with Čirgić (2011) leading the efforts to establish the new Montenegrin standard through the work of the Faculty for the Montenegrin Language and Literature in Cetinje, and rivals such as Glušica (2020) who contends that the standardization of Montenegrin is motivated by nationalist ideology and is not based on linguistic facts. She contends that the standardization efforts have served to divide the people of Montenegro rather than to unite them. In my own writing, I have researched the historical and dialectological factors that have been used to justify a separate Montenegrin language asserting that it has the most difficult road to full realization as a standard language (Greenberg, 2004). Mønnesland (2009) described matters in Montenegro through a similar lens. Finally, for Serbian the focus has largely been in the transition from Serbo-Croatian to Serbian with fewer nationalistically inspired accounts of the legitimacy or place of a separate Serbian language (Bugarski, 2012 and Okuka, 2009). 600
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Within the former Yugoslavia, the Macedonian language has also been the subject of extensive sociolinguistic research regarding the link between language and national identity. Here, Friedman has been the leading scholar consistently publishing throughout his career works on sociolinguistic topics on Macedonia. Thus, Friedman (2000) traces the developments that led to the standardization of the modern Macedonian literary language and the link between that literary norm and Macedonian national identity. In a subsequent contribution, he considered the twentieth-century socio-political context in the Balkans and how the Macedonian language has over the years contributed to the construction of Macedonian identity as clearly differentiated from both Bulgarian and Serbian identities (Friedman, 2003).
Language policy and planning In the area of language planning and policy (LPP), the lands of the former Yugoslavia have attracted the attention of many researchers. The volume Language Planning in Yugoslavia (edited by Bugarski & Hawkesworth, 1992) brought together many leading experts on the issues of LPP on the eve of Yugoslavia’s collapse and the outbreak of armed conflicts. The volume includes a survey of LPP as related to Serbo-Croatian (Škiljan, 1992), the status of Slovene LPP within Yugoslavia (Toporišič, 1992), the status of Albanian in Yugoslavia (Zymberi, 1992), and of the Turkish language as a minority language in Yugoslavia (Tanasković, 1992). A follow-up volume was published in 2004 with some of the same linguists following a conference in 2001 at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London (Hawkesworth & Bugarski, 2004). LPP is also a frequent theme found in sociolinguistic considerations of the Albanian language both within Albania and Kosovo. For instance, Duncan (2016) considered the role of policies towards the Albanian language in the Balkans (including the former Yugoslavia) and how those policies fomented and perpetuated conflict. He contrasts Serbian language policies towards Albanians and that of Macedonians, suggesting that a more accommodationist policy of the Macedonian government has led to the reduction of tensions and allowed for conflict de-escalation. Emphasizing planning issues in standard Albanian, Lloshi (2006) addressed ongoing controversies in postCommunist Albania around the adequacy of the standard Albanian language and concluded that no major LPP efforts need to be introduced to reform the standard language. In that same year, Pani’s contribution (2006) explored the relationship between the Albanian spoken in Albania and that spoken in Kosovo and attributes socio-historical reasons to the differences between the language in these two countries. Outside the former Yugoslavia and Albania, LPP issues have been the focus of sociolinguistic research also in Bulgaria and Greece, although perhaps in both these countries LPP issues have been less dominant in the literature. For instance, Videnov (1999) presented a useful overview of the LPP issues affecting the development of Bulgarian since the late nineteenth century and the tension between a standard based on northeastern Bulgarian dialects and the non-standard pronunciation of the capital city of Sofia. The plight of the standard Bulgarian language was also discussed by Aleksandrova and Tomov (2019), who compare earlier codification processes of Bulgarian in the nineteenth century with more contemporary developments. For Greek, much of the LPP-related research has focused on the heterogeneity of Modern Greek from the founding of the modern Greek state in 1830. LPP issues surrounding the standardization of the Greek language were centered around resolving issues caused by Greek diglossia whereby a written and spoken norm were both considered to be official until 1976. The spoken form was based on the Peloponnesian dialect (Demotic), while the written form was based on much more archaic forms of the language. Kazazis had a keen interest 601
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in these topics and wrote about diglossia in a series of works. Here I highlight two of these: Kazazis (1976) on some peculiarities of Modern Greek diglossia and Kazazis (1994), which described the ultimate dismantling of diglossia in 1976. Other works on diglossia and LPP for Modern Greek include Papatzikou (1997), who provides a survey of diglossia for Greek since ancient times and concludes that the LPP processes culminating in the 1976 adoption of Demotic marked the end of diglossia for the Greek language; and Moschonas (2019), who considered the ongoing standardization efforts within Modern Greek beyond the 1976 adoption of the new official standard arguing that more recent times have seen a greater permissiveness in regard to what forms are acceptable in the standard language.
Issues of regional and minority languages and dialects In all of the Balkan countries, the topic of regional and minority languages and regional dialect varieties have proven to be an area of great interest for sociolinguists. Some of the works already mentioned also intersect with this topic, and I provide my own analysis of the state of regional and minority languages in the Balkans in the next section. The topics in this area include (1) studies on the status of the Hungarian minority and Hungarian language in Romania (Dragoman, 2018 and Horváth & Toró, 2018); (2) the status of the Albanian minority and language in Greece (Gogonas & Michail, 2015 and Tsitsipis, 1997), of the Macedonian language in Greece (Schmieger, 1998), and of the Muslim minority groups in northeastern Greece (Sella-Mazi, 1997); (3) the status of the Arumanian (also known as Vlach) speakers in the various Balkan countries (Sorescu-Marinkovic et al., 2021); and (4) the status of Muslim Slavic minority populations including Bosniaks in Serbia and Montenegro (Greenberg, 2015), Pomaks in Bulgaria (Adamou & Fanchiullo, 2018), and Gorani in Kosovo and Macedonia (Nomachi, 2018). Many of the issues impacting the status of the minority languages in the Balkans arise from the legal status of these languages. In some cases, the constitutions of some states provide explicit protections of specific minorities and their languages, while in other cases these protective mechanisms have been agreed to through European frameworks such as the European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML). The most contentious of the language minority issues have arisen in those states where guarantees of minority language rights have been either actively denied by the dominant nation-forming group of the state or through the lack of any accommodation through the ECRML. The remainder of this contribution will consider these matters to provide some context to the directions of sociolinguistic research on the Balkans.
Observations on current regional and minority issues in the Balkans As the preceding survey of sociolinguistic research reveals, one of the underlying realities in the Balkans is that the national boundaries inadequately correspond to the ethnic and linguistic boundaries. For instance, after 1991 in the former Yugoslav territories old majority populations have become new minorities in the smaller less ethnically diverse states. Elsewhere in the Balkans, nearly every international boundary has had implications for splitting of an ethnolinguistic group off from its kin state, as in the example of Slavic speakers in Albania, Greece, and Romania or Albanian speakers in Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Montenegro. As seen later, the Balkan states share some of the same challenges with regard to the protection and promotion of the rights of minority populations, especially in connection with their rights to use their languages in official communications, and to receive primary and secondary 602
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school education in their mother tongue. I argue that while there has been some pressure from outside of the Balkans to conform to European models on linguistic minorities, local resistance to change has prevented significant progress in this direction. This lack of progress has been prevalent no matter the history, past political system, or ethnic configuration of the Balkan states examined. While much of my effort will be focused on ex-Yugoslavia, I will draw upon data and scholarship from the other Balkan states as well.
Language policy models When considering language policy models, Schmidt (1998) proposed four language policy approaches typically used by states to manage potential language conflicts. These models include: • Domination/exclusion: the dominant ethnic group maintains power over minority ethnic groups by preserving the supremacy of the dominant language and not providing minorities with the means to learn the “language of power” or to use their own languages to move up the social/ economic/political ladder. • Assimilation: the state seeks to assimilate its minorities by encouraging them to learn and use the national language. • Pluralism: the state promotes tolerance towards minority languages, encourages multilingualism, and preserves the rights of speakers of less widely spoken languages within the polity. • Linguistic confederation: languages within a polity are territorially based, and each language is identified with specific regions, municipalities, or towns/villages. These models are not mutually exclusive: a given policy may combine elements from some of the models, and policies may shift from one model to the next over time. The four models represent a continuum from the most restrictive language policies (domination/exclusion) to the most tolerant ones (linguistic confederationism). In Europe, the language model most frequently promoted within European institutions is that of pluralism. The Council of Europe has played an important role in advancing this model through its 1992 Charter on Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML). The ECRML attempted to create a protective mechanism for regional and minority languages traditionally spoken on the continent, while simultaneously protecting the status of a given country’s majority language(s). It defined a regional or minority language as a language traditionally used within a given territory of a state by nationals of that state who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the state’s population; and is different from the official language(s) of that state; it does not include either dialects of the official language(s) of the state or the languages of migrants.4 The regional or minority language may be territorially based, i.e., characteristic of a specific region of the state, or extra-territorial, i.e., spoken traditionally within the state but not found in a specific geographic region. The Charter emphasizes that the only regional or minority languages worthy of protective measures under the ECRML are the languages that are considered to be “traditionally spoken” within the territory of a state. No protective measures, therefore, would be afforded to the languages of migrants who have not traditionally resided in the specific country. Each signatory to the Charter enjoys the prerogative of declaring which regional and minority languages it recognizes, and to determine a minimum number of promotive measures to protect and preserve the country’s minority languages. The Council of Europe has no enforcement powers, and acceptance and ratification of the Charter are optional. The ECRML is designed to promote multiculturalism and multilingualism while affirming that policies aiming to protect and 603
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encourage use of regional or minority languages should not have the effect of threatening the status of the official languages and the need to learn them. Moreover, the Charter allows for Each contracting State . . . [to] specify in its instrument of ratification, acceptance or approval, each regional or minority language, or official language which is less widely used on the whole or part of its territory, to which the paragraphs chosen . . . shall apply.5 Signatory countries are required to implement at least 35 paragraphs and sub-paragraphs of the Charter, spread across provisions in the areas of education/cultural activities, judicial authority, administrative authorities/public services, media, and economic/social life. Upon ratification, the signatory countries are required to declare which languages on their territory constitute regional and minority languages and which of the Charter’s provisions will be implemented. Thereafter, the signatory countries are expected to produce periodical reports to the Council of Europe on the status of ECRML implementation, outlining the country’s progress in ensuring that the Charter’s provisions are adhered to. The application or non-application of the ECRML in the Balkan states will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter. The analysis will reveal a broad spectrum of language policies among the Balkan states, and uncover several significant inconsistencies in language policy that are symptoms of continuing intra-Balkan tensions. Ultimately, without harmonization of these divergent language policies, the path towards improved relations among the Balkan states and the region’s ethnic groups may prove to be difficult in the future.
The Balkans and the ECRML The ECRML sets up a mechanism for improving the lot of speakers of regional and minority languages within Europe. For the Balkans, where ethnic and linguistic diversity is so pronounced, the recent nationalist-inspired destruction of Yugoslavia has proven to be a challenge to those espousing an accommodationist policy towards minority groups. Nevertheless, five former Yugoslav republics have signed and ratified the ECRML, including Bosnia and Herzegovina Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Ironically, precisely in two states with a history of some of the most virulent nationalism – Croatia and Serbia – the ECRML has become a reality. Conversely, Greece, a nation that did not experience Communist rule and the first Balkan country to join the European Economic Community, the ECRML has been neither signed nor ratified. In the following sections, I consider (1) the nations that have signed/ratified the ECRML; (2) the one Balkan nation that has signed but not ratified the ECRML; and (3) the nations that have not even signed the ECRML. I attempt to draw conclusions based on contrasts and comparisons among the three groups of Balkan nations. I suggest that historical context and a desire for European integration have motivated some Balkan nations to adopt the ECRML, while others have remained stubbornly entrenched nation-states that continue to suppress and exclude their minority populations. Without overt pressure from European institutions, the ECRML has had only a limited moderating effect on language policies across the Balkans.
Adoption of the ECRML: most former Yugoslav republics and Romania6 Croatia was the first state in the region to ratify the ECRML in 1997, followed by Slovenia in 2000, Serbia and Montenegro in 2006, Romania in 2008, and Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2011. The Republic of Serbia and Montenegro ratified the Charter a mere three months before the referendum 604
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on Montenegrin independence was passed by a slim majority of Montenegro’s citizens. These five states represent five of the six original “nations” of Tito’s Yugoslavia: Croats, Montenegrins, Muslims (now Bosniaks), Serbs, and Slovenes. For these five former Yugoslav republics, language policy has continued in the spirit of Yugoslav language policy as articulated through the 1974 Yugoslav Federal Constitution. As I have discussed elsewhere (Greenberg, 2008), this constitution provided for enhanced language rights for the country’s “nationalities” (narodnosti) and “national minorities” (nacionalne manjine). This complex system accounted for constitutive nations of Yugoslavia, each of which had a home republic, nationalities consisting of ethnic groups whose ancestral state was outside of the former Yugoslavia, and national minorities consisting of ethnic groups with no ancestral homeland. The new states that emerged after Yugoslavia’s breakup simplified this three-tier system by conflating nationalities and national minorities. The resulting system is that of a constitutive nation and minorities who enjoy constitutional protections. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia recognized through the ECRML many of the same languages and minority groups that had already enjoyed protected status under Yugoslavia. Table 51.1 lists these languages in these five states. As Table 51.1 reveals, the breakup of a joint Serbo-Croatian language has also meant that what was once an official language in all Yugoslav republics (Serbo-Croatian) has now become splintered, and overnight its successor languages have often become new minority languages. Furthermore, the table reveals that each newly independent state has treated the four successor languages differently. Thus, Slovenia has failed to provide any provisions to the four successor languages even if many of those speakers reside on Slovene territory. Croatia has only provided recognition to Serbian, while Serbia has put in place provisions for Bosnian and Croatian but not Montenegrin. Bosnia and Herzegovina has been the most inclusive on paper, allowing for Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian to be official languages while Montenegrin is recognized as a regional or minority language. The Slovenes justified the exclusion of the languages of nearly all of the ethnic/national groups from the former Yugoslavia, claiming that these groups were not autochthonous within Slovenia’s borders (Greenberg, 2018). While this claim may be applicable to Bosniaks or Macedonians, the notion that Croats are not autochthonous to the territory of Slovenia or that Slovenes are not autochthonous in Croatia is dubious. The Slovenian/Croatian political boundary does not correspond to the ethnic boundary; this scenario is typical of most of the states in the region. Dialectally, the northwestern Croatian dialects share many features with Slovene dialects.7 The 2002 Slovenian census revealed that there are more Croats in Slovenia than Italians or Hungarians. Similarly, Table 51.1 Regional/minority languages in former Yugoslav republics Republic
Regional or minority languages recognized under ECRML
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Albanian, Czech, Italian, German, Hungarian, Ladino, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Polish, Romanian, Rusyn, Slovak, Turkish, Ukrainian, Yiddish Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Rusyn, Serbian, Slovak, Ukrainian Albanian, Romani Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Bunjevački, Croatian, Hungarian, Romani, Romanian, Rusyn, Slovak, Ukrainian Hungarian, Italian, Romani
Croatia Montenegro Serbia Slovenia
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Croatian census figures from 2001 include 13,173 citizens declaring themselves to be Slovene or 0.3% of the total population. This number is only slightly lower than the number of Hungarians, but higher than that of Czechs, Slovenes, and Rusyns, all of whom enjoy protections under the ECRML in Croatia.8 Nevertheless, Slovenia did not grant recognition to speakers of Croatian, and Croatia did not extend protections to Slovene speakers. The signing and ratifying of the ECRML in the five former Yugoslav republics may have had positive ramifications for the public image of these states within Europe and among members of the Council of Europe. However, the Charter has done little to contribute to better relations among the former Yugoslav republics. This absence of positive influence is manifest in the lack of reciprocity among the signatory Balkan nations. Since the new political boundaries do not correspond to the ethnic ones, new majority/minority relations have evolved in the four republics. The Charter provided an opportunity for reciprocity with regard to treatment of minorities across the region. Had Slovenia recognized a Croat or Serb minority, perhaps Croatia and Serbia would have reciprocated and protected a Slovene minority. Croatia recognized the Serbian language as a minority language, but as of 2003 did not make provisions for government-funded Serbian-language schools, as seen in Croatia’s report to the Council of Europe: “The Serbian national minority realize this right in pre-school education, but their right to elementary school education in a separate institution has not yet been realized.” Meanwhile, by 2007 Serbia reported that several Croatian-language elementary schools were functioning in the country, especially in the Vojvodinian city of Subotica.9 Thus, at least on the basis of the self-reported compliance with the Charter, Croatia and Serbia have not displayed reciprocity regarding the providing of elementary school education in Serbian and Croatian in the areas of mixed Serb/Croat populations. Similar inconsistencies can be seen in the lack of reciprocity between Serbia and Montenegro. In October 2007, over a year after seceding from the joint state of Serbia and Montenegro, Montenegro adopted a new constitution in which Montenegrin was declared the official language, alongside Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Albanian. However, Serbia has not recognized the separateness of the Montenegrin language and has not made any provisions through the ECRML to protect the rights of Montenegrin speakers on its territory. Romania signed the ECRML in 1995 and ratified it in 2008 just as it was joining the EU. Through the ECRML, Romania has recognized 20 languages as regional or minority languages ranging from Albanian to Ukrainian. Some of the languages are spoken by very few of Romania’s citizens and do not always appear to be autochthonous to its territory (e.g. Albanian, Macedonian, and Russian). Perhaps one of the most significant provisions of Romania’s policy towards its regional and minority languages is to provide protective measures under Part 3 of the Charter when the population speaking a regional or minority language exceeds 20% within a region. These provisions would therefore apply to the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, a minority that has had long-standing grievances regarding the use of the Hungarian language in Romania. For instance, in the period prior to Romania’s ratification of the ECRML, the Hungarians in Romania were dissatisfied with what they view as their marginalization at the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj. In the 1990s the Hungarians had campaigned for the separation of this university into two institutions: a Romanian-language university and a Hungarian-language university. Their campaign was unsuccessful; rather, the decision was to allow for degree programs in Romanian and Hungarian in compromise that would allow for a minority of courses of study in the Hungarian language and official equality of the two languages at the university. However, many of the Hungarian faculty felt disenfranchised by this arrangement, complaining that they had no autonomy within the university. The tensions 606
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reached crisis proportions in 2006 when two ethnic Hungarian professors were dismissed by the university administration.10 Traditionally, Romania has been a strong nation-state for the Romanian people and this notion has been one that has provoked efforts by the Hungarian minority to gain new rights. According to Romania’s 1991 Constitution, which was amended in 2003, the sole official language of Romania is Romanian (Article 13). The constitution also declares Romania to be an indivisible national state, which some commentators have called an implication that Romania is a nation-state formed by the Romanian people.11 Article 6 protects the rights of Romania’s citizens to an identity, stating that the “State recognizes and guarantees the right of persons belonging to national minorities to the preservation, development and expression of their ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity.” The Hungarian linguistic minority in Romania has received protections of the ECRML since 2008, but there is evidence that the Council of Europe has considered these protections to be inadequate. In 2018, the Council of Europe accepted recommendations of a committee of experts reviewing Romania’s periodical reports on its implementation of the ECRML and concluded that the Romanian authorities should “reconsider the thresholds for official use of minority languages in the administration” and provide “training in a sufficient number of teachers with regard to Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, German, Hungarian, Romani, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Turkish and Ukrainian” (Council of Europe, 2018). The ECRML in Romania, as in the former Yugoslav republics, provides a framework for addressing grievances of speakers of regional or minority languages, but the tangible benefits of the Charter are often not realized.
Signed but not ratified: Macedonia The Republic of Macedonia signed the ECRML but has still not ratified it. Macedonia signed in 1996, i.e., some four years after the Charter was drafted. Given the long period of inaction towards ratification, it seems unlikely that the Charter will be implemented in RN Macedonia in the near future. Macedonia has had to make accommodations for the largest ethnic minority within its borders, namely the Albanian community. In Macedonia, the country’s two largest ethnic groups were on the verge of a full-scale ethnic conflict in 2001. Under pressure from international mediators, both sides signed the Ohrid Framework Agreement in August of 2001, and this agreement served as a mechanism for enhancing the linguistic rights of Albanians in the country. Unlike the surrounding nationstates, a new Macedonian Constitution (2001) allowed for languages spoken by at least 20% of the country’s population to be co-official with Macedonian. The only group that this provision has applied to is the country’s ethnic Albanian community. This same constitution made the claim in its Preamble that Macedonia consists of the Macedonian people and “part of the Albanian people, the Turkish people, the Vlach people, the Serbian people, the Romany people, the Bosniac people and others.”12 Would Macedonia’s ratification of the ECRML it signed in 1996 have forestalled the rising discontent of its Albanians, who in the mid-1990s had unsuccessfully been advocating for state-funded Albanian-language institutions of higher learning in the country? Would the frustrations of Albanians have been lessened had Macedonia embraced the accommodationist and pluralistic principles of the Charter? However, given these provisions allowing for the Albanian language to be co-official with Macedonian, it seems unlikely that RN Macedonia will pursue further consideration of the ECRML, since this document would require reopening the debate on whether Albanian is a regional or minority language of the country rather than a co-official one. 607
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Lack of accommodation to minority languages: Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece In Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece official monolingualism has been a norm that successive governments and constitutions have embraced. Minority groups in these states have been either too weak, too poorly organized, or too heavily persecuted. For whatever reason, their linguistic rights have been largely ignored, as the states they live in have adhered to the notions of strong nationstates employing Schmidt’s models of domination/exclusion or assimilation regarding regional or minority languages. Bulgaria’s record on languages other than Bulgarian on its territory has been assimilationist. From the notorious campaigns of the Communists in the 1980s to Bulgarianize all Turkish names to the country’s official stance of not recognizing a Macedonian language, Bulgaria has attempted to impress a Bulgarian identity and language on its people. While compromises with the country’s Turkish minority have been made since the fall of Communism, the Bulgarian majority has not yet garnered the political will to enshrine any of these rights through the ECRML. Albania has been lukewarm about accommodating its linguistic minorities. According to the Macedonian news agency MIA, the Macedonian ambassador to Albania requested that Macedonian language schools be established in Albania to serve the Macedonian-speaking population. According to the report, the Albanians rejected this demand, and claimed that the Macedonians were copying the Greeks of southern Albania who had made a similar demand. MIA reported that the Ambassador had indicated that since Macedonia has supported Albanian-language schools, Albania should reciprocate, and Macedonia will help finance the enterprise.13 Greece has perhaps been the most entrenched nation-state of the Balkans. The Greek state has long held a domination/exclusion language policy. Simply put, the speakers of minority languages in Greece have had no right to use their language in official capacities, and in 1930s under General Metaxis had been banned from speaking their native languages altogether. The intractable policy on minorities has affected Greek relations with neighboring states, especially Albania and North Macedonia. The latter has repeatedly attempted to advocate for the Macedonians in northern Greece, including through a 2007 proposed resolution in the Council of Europe. However, Greece has not suffered politically or economically because of its non-compromising attitudes towards its minority populations. Like France, it remains an anomalous example of the philosophy of “one nation, one flag, one language.”
Conclusion The Balkans provides a view into some entrenched sociolinguistic problems. While some Balkan states have tried to harmonize their language policies with those of other European states, other Balkan states have been mired in assimilationist or domination/exclusion language policies that often continue earlier language policies or perpetuate or even exacerbate the grievances of disenfranchised minority groups. The broad comparisons of language policies across the contemporary Balkan states recall Friedman’s categorization of language controversies as “recurring, remissive, resolved, or new issues” (Friedman, 1998). Many of the issues discussed earlier are recurring, such as the status of the Hungarian language in Romania, the status of Macedonian speakers in Greece, or the status of Albanian within Macedonia. Few of the issues seem resolved, although some progress has been made among the successor states in ex-Yugoslavia to recognize the new linguistic realities resulting from the breakup of Serbo-Croatian. In addition, it is clear that the signing and ratification of the ECRML does not automatically result in resolving all language policy issues 608
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vis-à-vis minority groups. The new issues to arise include the status of the Montenegrin language, should the Bosnian language be recognized in Croatia and Slovenia, and whether higher education should be provided to significantly large linguistic communities in places where these languages typically had no such status in the past. The integration of Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria into the European Union has not necessarily changed existing policy towards linguistic minorities in these countries. Slovenia signed and ratified the ECRML several years before acceding to the EU, and Bulgaria has not been more accommodationist toward its own linguistic minorities since joining the EU in 2007. Romania joined the EU and adopted the ECRML around the same time, but is criticized for the way it has implemented the Charter. Croatia joined the EU after implementing the ECRML but has not made much progress regarding protective measures towards the Serbian language. While Europe has attempted to push for more inclusionary language policies, the Council of Europe has no enforcement mechanism, and states are free to choose the languages and provisions of the Charter they intend to implement. The notion of a multilingual Europe has not truly trickled down to the Balkans. Multilingual Yugoslavia was replaced by smaller aspiring nation-states, and the other Balkan states have retained strong nation-states with largely monolingual character and weak provisions to protect regional and minority languages.
Notes 1 In this connection, the work of Sandfeld (1930) has been influential in defining the notions of Sprachbund or “speech territory” where the Balkan languages and dialects have come into contact. The linguistic features that emerged in these languages, the so-called Balkanisms, included shared phonological, morphological, and syntactic features. Examples of Balkanisms include a tendency to lose the infinitive, the use of definite articles, or the spread of special renarrated past tense forms unique to these diverse languages. 2 In 2019, the official name of the Republic of Macedonia was changed to the Republic of North Macedonia. In this text I refer to the country as “Macedonia” for the period between 1991–2019 and as the Republic of North Macedonia (RN Macedonia) for the period after 2019. 3 I wish to thank and acknowledge Tamara Butigan, a doctoral candidate in applied linguistics at the University of Auckland, for her invaluable assistance with the literature review for this expanded and revised chapter in the second edition of this handbook. I also wish to acknowledge her for proofreading final versions of this contribution. 4 The text of the Charter is available at http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/Html/148.htm. 5 Ibid. 6 As seen later, RN Macedonia has not ratified the ECRML and Kosovo is not a member of the Council of Europe so is not considered in this analysis. 7 These common features are characteristic of Slovene dialects and the neighboring Croatian dialects known as the Kajkavian dialects of northwestern Croatia. The common features include some phonological features, prosodic features, and the use of the interrogative pronoun kaj “what.” See also Kapović (2017). 8 These data are found in Croatia’s second periodical report on the implementation of the ECRML, which I downloaded from the Council of Europe website listed in Note 24. 9 These reports are available for download at the website listed in Note 4. 10 See “Hungary Asks Romania to Reinstate 2 Ethnic Hungarian Professors” from International Herald Tribune from December 6, 2006. The text is available at www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/12/06/europe/ EU_GEN_Hungary_Romania_Minority.php. 11 See www.coe.ro/pdf/CDL-AD(2003)004-e.pdf for an opinion from the Council of Europe on the then proposed draft of the amended Romanian Constitution. 12 The text was taken from www.minelres.lv/NationalLegislation/Macedonia/Macedonia_Const2001_excerpts_English.htm. 13 See “Macedonia Wants Macedonian Language Schools in Albania” from October 10, 2008. The text is available at http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/3905/2.
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References Adamou, E., & Fanchiullo, D. (2018). Why Pomak will not be the next Slavic literary language. In Linguistic regionalism in Eastern Europe and beyond. Minority, regional and literary microlanguages (pp. 40–65). Peter Lang Publishing House. Aleksandrova, T., & Tomov, M. (2019). Some aspects of the Bulgarian standard language codification as a continuous process. Papers of BAS – Humanities and Social Sciences, 6(2). Alexander, R. A. (2006). Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A grammar with sociolinguistic commentary. University of Wisconsin Press. Auty, R. (1958). The linguistic revival among the Slavs of the Austrian empire, 1780–1850: The role of individuals in the codification and acceptance of new literary languages. Modern Language Review, 53, 392–404. Birnbaum, H. (1980). Language, ethnicity and nationalism: The linguistic foundation of a unified Yugoslavia. In D. Djordjević (Ed.), The creation of Yugoslavia, 1914–1918 (pp. 157–182). Clio Books. Bugarski, R. (2004). What’s in a name: The case of Serbo-Croatian. Revue des Études Slaves, 75(1), 11–20. Bugarski, R. (2012). Portret jednog jezika. Biblioteka XX vek. Bugarski, R., & Hawkesworth, C. (Eds.). (1992). Language planning in Yugoslavia. Slavica Pub. Butler, T. (1970). The origins of the war for a Serbian language and orthography. in: Lord, A. B., Weintraub, W., Setchkarev, V., & Rothstein, R. A. (Eds). Harvard Slavic Studies, 5, 1–80. Čirgić, A. (2011). Crnogorski jezik u prošlosti i sadašnjosti. Institut za crnogorski jezik i književnost. Council of Europe. (2018). New reports on protection of regional and minority languages in Austria. Cyprus and Romania. www.coe.int/en/web/portal/-/new-reports-on-protection-of-regional-and-minority-languages-in-austria-cyprus-and-romania Dragoman, D. (2018). Language planning and the issue of the Hungarian minority in post-communist Romania: From exclusion to reasonable compromises. Studia Politica, Romanian Political Science Review, 18(1), 121–140. Duncan, D. (2016). Language policy, ethnic conflict, and conflict resolution: Albanian in the former Yugoslavia. Language Policy, 15(4), 453–474. Friedman, V. A. (1975). Macedonian language and nationalism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Balkanistica, 2, 83–98. Friedman, V. A. (1998). The implementation of standard Macedonian: Problems and results. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 131, 31–57. Friedman, V. A. (2000). The modern Macedonian standard language and its relation to modern Macedonian identity. In V. Roudometoff (Ed.), The Macedonian question: Culture, historiography, politics (pp. 173–206). East European Monographs. Friedman, V. A. (2003). Language in Macedonia as an identity construction site. In B. D. Joseph, J. Destafano, N. G. Jacobs, & I. Lehiste (Eds.), Perspectives on language conflict, language competition, and language coexistence (pp. 257–295). East European Monographs. Glušica, R. (2020). Crnogorski jezik i nacionalizam. Biblioteka XX vek. Gogonas, N., & Michail, D. (2015). Ethnolinguistic vitality, language use and social integration among Albanian immigrants in Greece. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 36(2), 198–212. Gołąb, Z. (1984). The Arumanian dialect of Kruševo in SR Macedonia, SFR Yugoslavia. Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Greenberg, R. (1999a). The breakup of Serbo-Croatian: Language diversity or language apartheid. Chicago Linguistics Society, 35, 51–68. Greenberg, R. (1999b). In the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s collapse: The politics of language death and language birth. International Politics, 36(2), 141–158. Greenberg, R. (2001). Language, nationalism, and the Yugoslav successor states. In C. O’Reilly (Ed.), Language, ethnicity and the state: Eastern Europe since 1989 (pp. 17–42). Palgrave. Greenberg, R. (2004). From Serbo-Croatian to Montenegrin: Politics of language in Montenegro. In C. Hawkesworth & R. Bugarski (Eds.), Language in the former Yugoslav lands (pp. 54–64). Slavica Publishers. Greenberg, R. (2008). Language and identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its disintegration (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Greenberg, R. (2015). The language situation for the Bosniaks on both sides of the Serbian/Montenegrin border. In T. Kamusella, M. Nomachi, & C. Gibson (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of Slavic languages, identities and borders (pp. 330–346). Palgrave Macmillan.
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Sociolinguistics in the Balkans Greenberg, R. (2017). When is a language a language? The case of former Yugoslavia. In M. Flier & A. Grazioso (Eds.), The battle for Ukrainian (pp. 513–526). Harvard University Press. Greenberg, R. (2018). Language policies on both sides of the Slovenia-Croatia border: Ongoing challenges regarding minority populations. In S. Dickey & M. Lauersdorf (Eds.), V zeleni drželi zeleni breg: Studies in Honor of Marc L. Greenberg (pp. 91–104). Slavica Publishers. Greenberg, R. (2019). The breakup of Serbo-Croatian: Some unresolved issues. Balkanistica, 32(1), 185–207. Greenberg, R. (2021). Standard language ideology and the South Slavic languages of the former Yugoslavia. In Cetinjski filološki dani, zbornik radova s naučnog skupa održanog na Cetinju 10–12 septembra 2019 (pp. 21–42). ISBN is 978-9940-40-076-7 Gröschel, B. (2009). Das Serbokroatische zwischen Linguistik und Politik. Lincom Europa. Hawkesworth, C., & Bugarski, R. (Eds.). (2004). Language in the former Yugoslav lands. Slavica Publishers. Horváth, I., & Toró, T. (2018). Language use, language policy, and language rights. In T. Kiss, I. G. Székely, T. Toró, N. Bárdi, & I. Horváth (Eds.), Unequal accommodation of minority rights (pp. 167–223). Palgrave Macmillan. Kapović, M. (2017). The position of Kajkavian in the South Slavic dialect continuum in light of old accentual isoglosses. Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 62(4), 606–620. Kazazis, K. (1976). A superficially unusual feature of Greek diglossia. In Papers from the twelfth regional meeting: Chicago linguistic society (pp. 369–375). University of Chicago. Kazazis, K. (1994). Dismantling Greek diglossia. In E. Fraenkel & C. E. Kramer (Eds.), Language contact – language conflict (pp. 7–26). Peter Lang. Koneski, B. (1980). Macedonian. In A. M. Schenker, E. Stankiewicz & M. S. Iovine (Eds.), The Slavic literary languages: Formation and development (pp. 53–63). Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Kordić, S. (2010). Jezik i nacionalizam. Durieux. Langston, K., & Peti-Stantić, A. (2014). Language planning and national identity in Croatia. Palgrave Macmillan. Lloshi, X. (2006). Standard Albanian: Linguistic controversy in post-Communist Albania. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 178, 93–101. Magner, T. (1967). Language and nationalism in Yugoslavia. Canadian Slavic Studies, 1(3), 333–347. Magner, T. (1988). Language and nationality in the Balkans: The case of Yugoslavia. Geolinguistics, 14, 108–124. Mønnesland, S. (2009). Sociolingvistička situacija u Crnoj Gori. In L. Badurina, I. Pranjković, & J. Silić (Eds.), Jezični varijeteti i nacionalni identiteti. Disput. Moschonas, S. (2019). From language standards to a standard language: The case of Modern Greek. Diacronia, 10. Naylor, K. (1978). The eastern variant of Serbo-Croatian as the lingua communis of Yugoslavia. In W. Schmalstieg & T. Magner (Eds.), Sociolinguistic problems in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia (pp. 456–468). Slavica Publishers. Naylor, K. (1980). Serbo-Croatian. In A. M. Schenker, E. Stankiewicz, & M. S. Iovine (Eds.), The Slavic literary languages: Formation and development (pp. 65–83). Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Nomachi, M. (2018). The Gorani people in search of identity: The current sociolinguistic situation among the Gorani community of the former Yugoslavia. Slavica Tartuensia XI / Slavic Eurasian Studies, 34, 375–412. Okuka, M. (2009). Srpski jezik danas. In L. Badurina, I. Pranjković, & J. Silić (Eds.), Jezični varijeteti i nacionalni identiteti. Disput. Pani, P. (2006). Some differences between varieties of Albanian with special reference to Kosovo. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 178, 55–73. Papatzikou, C. (1997). An instance of triglossia? Codeswitching as evidence for the present state of Greece’s ‘language question’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 126, 33–62. Peti-Stantić, A. (2008). Jezik naš i/ili njihov. Srednja Europa. Pinto, V. (1980). Bulgarian. In A. M. Schenker, E. Stankiewicz, & M. S. Iovine (Eds.), The Slavic literary languages: Formation and development (pp. 37–51). Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Sandfeld, K. (1930). Linguistique balkanique. Klinckiek. Schmidt, R. (1998). The politics of language in Canada and the United States: Explaining the differences. In T. Ricento & B. Burnaby (Eds.), Language and politics in the United States and Canada (pp. 37–70). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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52 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN RUSSIA Olga Blinova, Natalia Bogdanova-Beglarian, Tatiana Popova and Tatiana Sherstinova
Historical background1 Social aspects of language have been of interest to Soviet linguists since the 1920s. However, some important ideas were also proposed in earlier works; in this regard, it is worth mentioning Baudouin de Courtenay’s thought about the differentiation of language, namely its “horizontal” (that is, territorial) and “vertical” (that is, social) division (Baudouin de Courtenay, 1908, p. XII). The most prominent authors of the early Soviet works, which today we would call studies in sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, were Derzhavin (1927), Karinsky (1929), Kartsevsky (1923), Larin (1928), Peterson (1927), Polivanov (1968b), Selischev (1928), Sergievsky (1927), Shor (1926), Yakubinsky (Ivanov & Jakubinskij, 1932) and Zhirmunsky (1936); for a review, see Alpatov (2005), Chemodanov (1975), Krysin (1977) and Kryuchkova (2008). Thus, Larin proposed to begin developing a “sociological linguistics”,2 which “has hardly begun yet in our country”. The main object of “sociological linguistics” was to become “the composition and structure of language life of a city” (Larin, 1977, p. 189). Larin insisted on studying urban language not as a “lowered standard language” and not as “ennobled peasant speech” but as a separate independent entity that does not coincide in its social basis and linguistic features with either the standard language or dialects. According to Larin’s ideas, urban language (along with the standard language and dialects) constitutes “the third main circle of linguistic phenomena” (Larin, 1977, p. 176). Marrism slowed down the development of Soviet sociolinguistics, as Kryuchkova (2008, p. 14) points out, in the Soviet Union, any posing the question on the social determinacy of certain facts of language was associated not with the works of Polivanov or Yakubinsky, but with the categorical and ignorant statements of Marr, which caused a very sceptical attitude of many scholars to the sociolinguistic problems. In the 1940s–60s, Soviet linguists turned to the study of regional dialects of the Russian language (see the papers of Avanesov, Borkovsky, Filin and many others), sometimes taking into account the social characteristics of dialect speakers (Erofeeva, 2001). 613
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The late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s saw an increase of interest in the study of speech, including within the framework of “social dialectology”, the objects of which are the so-called uncodified forms of speech (i.e., colloquial speech, urban and rural non-standard varieties, so-called просторечие; and jargons and argots; see, in particular, Gukhman & Yartseva, 1969; Lapteva, 1966; Sirotinina, 1969), as well as fundamental collective monographs (Zemskaya, 1973; Zemskaya et al., 1981). It is also worth noting the four-volume Russian Language and Soviet Society (Panov, 1968), in which changes in the Russian language were analyzed in connection with changes in the structure of Soviet society, including local pronunciation features (Moscow and Leningrad norms and their relationship), the impact of the standard language on the pronunciation norms, socially determined changes in the vocabulary of the language, active processes in word formation and many others. We may also mention some other studies of the period under discussion devoted to non-standard speech (in Russian, просторечие) and the relationship between standard and non-standard language varieties (see Barannikova, 1974; Bondaletov, 1974; Borisova-Lukashanets, 1983; Skvortsov, 1977; Zemskaya & Shmelev, 1984), as well as studies in language variation (see in particular Skvortsov, 1981, and Jazykova, 1986). Of particular importance is the publication of a book based on extensive empirical material, the collective monograph Russian Language According to Mass Survey Data (Krysin, 1974). The authors obtained extensive statistical material and made a number of conclusions about the correlations between the usage of language variants equally allowed by codified norms and a number of social characteristics of Russian speakers (among them: age, education and where it was obtained, social status, location of childhood home, place of longest residence, regularity with which speakers listen to radio or watch TV programmes, social status of parents and place of the parents’ birth). In the phonetic section, attention is focused on the variation of the pronunciation of consonants. In the morphology section, the authors concentrate on the variation of personal and impersonal forms of the verb, the forms of the nominative plural of masculine nouns and the forms of genitive and locative cases of animate nouns. In the word formation section, the study focuses on variants of names denoting persons and processes. We may also note the publication of the collective monograph Interference of Sound Systems (Bondarko & Verbitskaya, 1987), devoted to pronunciation variation in different regions of the USSR. The monograph examined pronunciation variations in nine Soviet republics and in 12 regions of Russia, covering the territories of North Russian, South Russian and Middle Russian dialects and dialects of the Ural region, using a large amount of data and applying the principles of statistical description. In the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, researchers focused on describing features of the Russian language at the new stage of socio-political life in Russia. Changes in phonetics, vocabulary and grammar, including those due to tumultuous societal changes, were considered. The tradition of the sociolinguistic study of language was continued in the collective monograph Russian Language of the End of XXth Century (Zemskaya, 1996). The mood of the period under discussion is characterized by anxiety regarding the blurring of the language standard, the loss of the former significance of language norms, see, for example, Krysin (2000b, 2003b) and Yudina (2010). Explaining current processes, Zemskaya (1996, pp. 12–13) points out the following changes in the functioning of the Russian language: a sharp increase in the number of participants in mass and collective communication, a sharp weakening (even destruction) of censorship and autocensorship, an increase in the personal element in speech, a growth in dialogic communication, an expansion of the spontaneous communication sphere and changes in oral forms of mass communication (creating opportunities for feedback) and changes in the situations and genres of 614
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communication in both public and private communication (“the rigid limits of official public communication are reduced”). Studies of the social differentiation of the Russian language continued, and important results are presented, in particular, in a monograph by Krysin (2003a); the author proposes the idea of a dual expression of social differentiation, which is realized through socially conditioned varieties of the national language and through socially marked linguistic means. In this chapter, we will focus primarily on the studies of the 2010s and early 2020s, which centered in one way or another on the links between the linguistic, communicative features of adult native speakers of Russian and their social characteristics, completely leaving aside macrosociolinguistic issues; about the latter issues, see in particular Gulida (2010). We will offer the reader an overview of the current state of research (without claiming to be complete).
Variationist studies Variationist sociolinguistics According to Gulida & Vakhtin (2010, pp. 114–115), “sociolinguistics is inconceivable without research within the framework of the theory of variation, which in the 1960s was formulated in a methodologically strict and conceptually complete form by W. Labov”; however, “on the Russian language . . . such studies are extremely rare”. The situation has not changed much in the 10 years since that work was published; this view is also expressed by the authors of the paper on the electronic database of variation “Vastry” (Dobrushina et al., 2018, p. 426).3 For example, if we search for publications in the scientific bibliographic database elibrary.ru using the query вариационная социолингвистика (that is, “variationist sociolinguistics”), then only two publications will appear in the search results; one of them is a paper on the speech of French youth, the second one is a monograph by Erofeeva (2005), a representative of the Perm school of sociolinguistics. The query “variationism” provides one publication on Russian as a heritage language (Neigi et al., 2014). If we look through the publications of the new journal Sociolinguistics (http://sociolinguistics.ru/), we will see a predominance of papers about the language situation in different regions of Russia and in the post-Soviet space on subjects such as language shift and language policy, and we will find one paper whose key words include “language variation” (Kashkarova, 2021). At the same time, if we search elibrary.ru, for example, for социолект “sociolect”, we get 936 contemporary publications. In the survey part of this chapter, we will focus on the linguistic descriptions of some Russian sociolects.
Contemporary approaches to describing language variation As Krysin (2008, 2021) points out, the following approaches to the problem of social differentiation of language are characteristic of the works of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. 1. Rejection of a straightforward view of the differentiation of language in connection with the social stratification of society. Modern sociolinguists are fully aware of the fact that “the nature of the relationship between the structure of society and the social structure of the language is very complex, indirect” and that “the pace of language development lags far behind the pace of development of society, . . . language, by virtue of its purpose to be a link between several generations succeeding each other is much more conservative than any given social structure” (Krysin, 2021, pp. 55–56). 615
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2. Rejection of ideas about the (complete) isomorphism of linguistic and social structures. 3. A broader view of the problem of social differentiation, which is beginning to be considered “in the context of the general problem of variation in linguistic means (which can be due to both social and intralinguistic reasons)” (Krysin, 2008, p. 76). In addition, researchers are paying more and more attention to functional and stylistic variation, taking into account such categories as linguistic prestige, social roles and status of speakers. 4. Moreover, according to (Krysin, 2008, p. 79), along with the traditionally distinguished basic subsystems of the national language, there are additional subsystems, intermediate in nature (“semidialects”, “interdialects”, “interjargons”, etc.). 5. Finally, as stated in (Krysin, 2008, p. 79), in contemporary studies “social differences begin to characterize to a greater extent the usage of linguistic units rather than their set”: the social characteristics of the speaker (age, gender, educational level, etc.) and the social characteristics of the hearer, as well as the relationship between the speaker and the addressee, the type of communicative situation, the purpose of communication and a number of other circumstances prove to be essential.
Types of variation4 Leonid Krysin (2007, pp. 10–11, 2021, pp. 179–181) proposes the following classification of the types of variation: 1. “free variation” (the variants are functionally equal, cf. the variant pronunciation of the hard or soft consonant before [e] in some borrowings like пре[тэ́]нзия – пре[т’э́]нзия “claim”), 2. “semantically conditioned variation” (the variants have semantic differences, cf. genitive and partitive forms of the type сахара “sugar-Gen.Sg” – сахару “sugar-Part.Sg”), 3. “stylistically conditioned variation” (the variants have stylistic differences, cf. the forms like тобою – тобой “you-Instr.Sg”, зимою – зимой “winter-Instr.Sg”, where the first member of each pair is archaic), 4. “professionally conditioned variation” (one of the variants is typical for the speech of a certain professional group, cf. the pair кóмпас – компáс, where the second variant is characteristic of the speech of sailors); 5. “socially conditioned variation” (cf. the accent variants по средáм and по срéдам “on Wednesdays”, the former used in the speech of the intelligentsia of the older generation); 6. “regionally conditioned variation” (for example, speakers of literary language living in Moscow and St. Petersburg have differences in the use of names of the same objects, as well as some accentual features). The examples of free variation do not exist for long; they quickly fall into other groups, acquiring functional specificity.
Sociolinguistic variables We will mention only some parameters of variation in segmental phonetics, word accentuation, and inflectional morphology discussed in the recent literature; see also the studies in the Vastry database (https://vastry.ru/): • assimilative softening of consonants; for example, Krasnova and Smirnova (2012) show that there are regional differences in the implementation of variants according to the so-called “older 616
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• • •
•
• •
orthoepic norm” (with softening like [д’в’]е “two”) and according to the so-called “younger orthoepic norm” (without softening, cf. [дв’]е “two”); variation of hard vs soft consonants before /e/ in borrowed words; see, for example, the description of the database project in Perova et al. (2016); earlier in Staferova (2014), it was proved that there is a correlation between the softening/non-softening of the consonant [т] and the speaker’s age; simplification of consonant groups; for example, Zhuravleva (2022) shows that younger speakers are more likely to simplify some consonant groups (for example, pronouncing -н- instead of -н(к)т- in Санкт-Петербург “Saint Petersburg”); pronunciation of the combination -чн-: in the competition of pronunciation variants with -чнand -шн- the variants with -шн- (which are closer to the orthographic appearance of the word) “win”; this is connected with educational practices and the acquisition of the standard language through a written text, see Krysin (2003a); in addition, the competing pronunciations have some local confinement to the Moscow (-шн-) and St. Petersburg variants of pronunciation; variation of the stress on the root vs. on the ending in verb forms with -ить in the present tense (except for the 1Sg form) of the type свéрлишь “drill-2Sg”, свéрлит “drill-3Sg” vs сверли́шь “drill-2Sg”, сверли́т “drill-3Sg”; in Krysin (2021, p. 200) and earlier works, it is stated that the stress on the root is more characteristic of the speech of the young and middle generations, the older generation prefers the variant with the stress on the ending to a greater extent; at the same time Streikmane (2021, p. 88) shows that the picture is more complex, but in general “differences in accentuation between representatives of different age groups are minimal and concern only individual words, not being a general trend”; variation of stress on the root vs. on the ending in word forms of non-productive verbs in the past tense, such as гна́ло – гнало́ “chase-N.Sg”; Savinov et al. (2019, p. 43) indicate that the percentage of pronunciations with the stress on the ending tends to increase from the older to the younger age group; variation of the forms of masculine plural nouns with the inflection -ы(и) vs. -а(я) and with the accent on the root vs on the ending such as кáтеры – катерá “motorboat-Nom.Pl”; in particular, Krysin (2021, pp. 198–199) and earlier works provide numerous examples that confirm the occupational specificity of the use of -а(я) forms, cf. соусá “sauce-Nom.Pl”, супá “soup-Nom. Pl”, тортá “cake-Nom.Pl”, шницеля́ “schnitzel-Nom.Pl” (in the speech of cooks), боцманá “boatswain-Nom.Pl”, штурманá “steersman-Nom.Pl”, тросá “hawser-Nom.Pl” (in the speech of sailors), обыскá “search-Nom.Pl”, приводá “detention-Nom.Pl” and срокá “term-Nom.Pl” (in the speech of law enforcement authorities).
The list of variant phenomena characteristic of Russian in the field of phonetics, morphology and word formation presented in Krysin (1974) seems still to be the most complete, although at least some variants have lost the status of normative and/or changed their usage frequency; see also the section “Social marking of language units” in Krysin (2000a, 2021), where non-normative variants are discussed as well.
Sociolects Already by the studies of Soviet linguists of the 1920s–30s key concepts for this chapter were introduced, in particular, the concept of “social dialect”. Selischev wrote about linguistic variation as early as 1928: The population of a given political community is a complex social aggregate of different social groups. Since within each group there are various linguistically marked subgroups, 617
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united by age, gender and other characteristics, the language of the group breaks up into several subgroup languages. The degree of divergence between them depends on extra-linguistic situations. For example, during periods of social cataclysms, the language of youth groups may reflect social changes to a much greater extent. (Selischev, 1928, p. 11) A sociolect is “a set of linguistic features peculiar to a social group . . ., identified according to characteristics such as class and age – within any given subsystem of the national language” (Belikov & Krysin, 2001, p. 30). Earlier Krysin (1974) and Krysin and Shmelev (1976), among others, showed that different social factors influence the distribution of language variants differently; the main factors can be ranked in importance as follows: territorial affiliation of speakers (place of childhood, place of longest residence); age, social status, educational level, territorial affiliation of parents and their social status. We include the following subsections in accordance with this ranking.
Region The ideas about the importance of studying urban language outlined in the historical section of this chapter are also reflected in contemporary works on the linguistic features observed in the speech of residents of a number of Russian cities: Moscow (Kitaygorodskaya & Rozanova, 2010), Leningrad/ St. Petersburg (Verbitskaya, 2017), Saratov (Sirotinina, 1988), Perm (Erofeeva, 2021), Omsk (Yunakovskaya, 2011) and others. Not only the colloquial speech of the speakers of the literary standard, but also the urban non-standard (rus. просторечие) has been studied (Kozlova & Kholodkova, 2009). In addition, under the influence of the ideas expressed in the early Soviet period, a branch of sociolect lexicography continues to develop, dealing with the compilation of dictionaries recording the linguistic features of the inhabitants of the cities, towns and urban conglomerations (see, for example, Arkhangelsk dictionary of vernacular speech, 2013, 2016, 2019; Erofeeva & Gruzberg, 2009; Erofeeva & Isakova, 2022; Lipatov, 2009; Livinskaya, 2015; Osipov, 2003). In particular, the monograph Language Practices of a Modern Citizen: The Case of Moscow (Kitaygorodskaya & Rozanova, 2010) analyzes situations of urban (non-domestic) communication. The authors, following Sirotinina (2008, p. 147), point out that the ideal description of a city’s language should be based on information of a sociological nature, but at the present stage, with the strong migration of the population and the absence of reliable sociological data on the social, national, professional and numerical composition of the residents of one or another city, such research is quite difficult to implement, especially when it comes to a megalopolis like Moscow. (Kitaygorodskaya & Rozanova, 2010, p. 25) Therefore, the monograph describes the language practices of Moscow as “a single complexly structured communicative space of everyday life”, and the speech of city residents “is studied in the structure of city communication, taking into account the whole set of its elements – the speaker, the addressee, the means of communication, the parameters of the situation” (Kitaygorodskaya & Rozanova, 2010, p. 32). Separate mention should be made of publications of transcripts of urban oral communication (see, in particular, Borisova et al., 1995; Yunakovskaya, 2007). To denote local variants of the Russian language, the notion of “regiolect” is also used, proposed in Gerd (1998) and understood by this author as an intermediate form between a standard language 618
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and a territorial dialect; it is the speech of inhabitants of small and medium-sized towns of one region, surrounded by local dialects (see also Trubinsky, 1991, and a review in Erofeeva, 2020). Regiolects are intermediate language formations based on the interaction of elements of a standard language, non-standard (просторечие) and local territorial dialects (and gradually displacing the latter); see (Erofeeva, 2020, pp. 598–599): “Modern regiolect is a mixed idiom which unites the idioms of a language functioning in a single (although quite extensive) territory, and performs in society the function of oral communication”, “at the same time, the regiolect does not simply borrow certain features of speech from the idioms mixed in it . . . but develops its own system”. Regiolect is variable: the speech . . . may be saturated with regiolect features to varying degrees, depending on social factors. For example, people with higher education rarely use lexical localisms in speech; in phonetic terms, their speech is closer to the standard language; on the contrary, people with a secondary education more often resort to local lexical elements (distinguishing them as worse than common Russian ones), and the phonetic regional colouring of their speech is generally brighter. (Erofeeva, 2020, p. 599) If we talk about the structural features that distinguish local variants of the language, then the literature describes primarily phonetics, accents, intonational features and inflectional and lexical characteristics (Krysin, 2021, p. 181). The term “ethnolect” is used to refer to variants of the Russian language that, to some extent, serve to form regional identity, function in multilingual regions and are influenced by local languages; see, for example, descriptions of the Russian language in Daghestan (Daniel et al., 2010; Daniel & Dobrushina, 2010; Panova et al., 2021).
Age The age factor, like the gender one, is based on biological, social and psychological properties of a person (Erofeeva, 2005, p. 130); in addition, age characteristics are closely related to generational ones. Accordingly, sometimes by analogy with “gender linguistics”, one speaks of “age linguistics”, but “an age as an objective measure of physical and mental development” and “an age as a culturally constructed phenomenon” are denoted by a single term (Mikljaeva, 2009). In this section, we will denote age groups using a simple trichotomy and subdividing the speakers into younger, older and middle-aged ones. The boundaries between these groups are used by different researchers in different ways. Child language remains outside the scope of this review because children are non-standard speakers; for a typology of speakers, see Mustajoki (2013). From earlier works, it is known that the speakers of the non-standard (urban or rural vernacular) depending on age show a tendency either to the common jargon (young speakers and middle-aged speakers) or to any territorial dialect (older speakers); that is, the older the non-standard speaker (просторечник), the more likely is the presence of locally conditioned language variants in his or her speech (Zemskaya, 1979). In addition, in some general cases, there are more innovations in the speech of the younger generation, and more archaic, obsolete phenomena in the speech of older speakers (Vakhtin & Golovko, 2004, p. 79). It should be noted that there are more special studies devoted to the language of young people than works on language and speech behaviour of older speakers; see Anishchenko (2010) for an overview of current studies. In particular, there are numerous dictionaries of youth slang (youth 619
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jargon) (see Grachev, 2006; Nikitina, 2013; Walter et al., 2005). A characteristic feature of many studies is the interest in subgroups singled out as a result of the fragmentation of the youth group. Subgroups are distinguished on different grounds; for example, the following classification is used in Anishchenko (2010): • • • • • •
representatives of subcultures (for example, goth and emo); representatives of “aggressive communities” (for example, skinheads and football fans); young people united by common interests (for example, gamers, graffitists and skateboarders); groups of students (senior schoolchildren and university students); a group of conscript soldiers; and a group of criminal youth.
The object of description in many studies is still the lexical specificity of the speech of youth groups. More particularly, the attention of researchers is attracted by the following phenomena: borrowings (predominantly anglicisms), some features of word formation (cf. the words with the morpheme -лов- like винтилово “mass detention”, мочилово “beating”), metaphors (cf. колесо, lit. “wheel”, actual meaning “tablet”); see the systematization of ways to replenish the youth vocabulary in Beregovskaya (1996) and Tsibizova and Galankina (2021). It is noted that for almost all elements of youth jargon, there are correspondences in the standard language; speaking in jargon performs an expressive function and the function of self-identification; when communicating with a non-member of his group, the youth jargon speaker switches to the common jargon or standard language (Vakhtin & Golovko, 2004). The standard is realized to the greatest extent in the speech of middle-aged adults (Vakhtin & Golovko, 2004, p. 79), but this group rarely becomes the object of special studies. The speech of the older generation has also been little studied; but we may note a recently published review (Pashina, 2021), which may indicate the development of interest in this issue. We can add some observations on the differences in the speech behaviour of the age groups. Notable is the publication of the collected papers Age-related Communicative Behavior, which includes a paper on the peculiarities of the communicative behaviour of the elderly in communication with young unfamiliar speakers (Shilikhina, 2003). In Shilikhina (2003), in particular, the use of the speech act of advice is described. Further, Krysin (2021, p. 123) writes that it is acceptable for an elderly person to address a younger unfamiliar interlocutor using the singular form ты “you-Sg”, and not the polite form Вы “you-Pl”, whereas the reverse is perceived as rude. In addition, the speech of older speakers addressed to younger speakers is characterized by a certain set of speech acts (for example, the speech act of prohibition).
Socio-economic class It is the task of sociologists to identify the scheme of the stratification of contemporary Russian society. We propose such stratification according to the model of Zaslavskaya (1997), who proceeded from the hypothesis that post-Soviet society consists of four social strata: the upper, middle, basic and lower, as well as a desocialized “social bottom” (rus. социальное дно, i.e., underclass). The upper stratum is the ruling one, which includes elite and sub-elite groups “occupying the most important positions in the system of state administration, in economic and power structures” (Zaslavskaya, 1997, p. 9). A small “middle stratum”, understood by analogy with the Western concept of “middle class”, is nascent; most of its representatives “possess neither capital that ensures personal independence, nor a level of professionalism that meets the requirements of 620
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postindustrial society, nor high social prestige” (ibid.). It includes businesspeople, the management of medium and small companies, the middle ranks of the bureaucracy, senior officers and the most qualified and competent specialists. Numerous representatives of the “base stratum” have average professional-qualification potential and relatively limited labour potential. This stratum includes the bulk of intelligentsia (rus. интеллигенция), employees of technical personnel, workers of mass professions of trade and service and a large part of the peasantry. The structure of the “lower stratum” is the least clear. For the most part, this stratum “consists either of elderly, poorly educated, not very healthy and strong people who have not earned sufficient pensions, or of those who have no professions and often no permanent occupation, the unemployed” (Zaslavskaya, 1997, p. 10). Representatives of the “social bottom” are isolated from the institutions of larger society but are included in criminal and semi-criminal activities. We utilize this model of stratification in the following discussion. It is important to note that most of the linguistic studies discussed here use the concept of “speech portrait” or “sociolinguistic portrait”, introduced into Soviet linguistics by Panov (1990). The creation of such “portraits” is based on the idea that the speech of an individual contains the features typical of the linguistic habits and linguistic characteristics of the described social group; accordingly, the task of the researcher is to identify these features and give them a sociolinguistic interpretation (Mamaeva, 2014). The “linguistic portrait” of a generalized representative of the ruling class (a government employee, a bureaucrat) was described by Panova (2005, 2006, 2017). Thus, the thesis is devoted to “the speech behavior of the civil servant in the process of professional activities, and his linguistic personality as a generalized image of the bearer of professional and communicative values” (Panova, 2005, p. 6). Panova analyzes the “administrative-political sociolect”, which is the heir to the language of Soviet party bureaucrats. The author, in particular, notes the tendency to standardize speech behaviour, and the limited professional vocabulary.5 The specificity of “administrative discourse” as a whole, according to Panova (2005), consists of its ideological conditionality and in the hierarchical nature of status-unequal official communication; the author notes that the professional speech of an official is characterized by the use of special terminology and business clichés, among other things. In Soviet and Russian linguistics, the speech portrait of the Russian интеллигент (a person engaged in intellectual work, a representative of the intelligentsia) has also been studied (Karasik, 2005; Krysin, 2001; Polivanov, 1968a; Yaroshenko, 2010). Thus, Krysin described “some originality in phonetics and word usage, characteristic of certain groups of native speakers of the standard language and, above all, groups of the intelligentsia” (Krysin, 2001, p. 91). Among the features described are the following: the archaic semi-soft [ж˙] and semi-soft or “European” [л˙] characteristic of the older generation; the reduction of the unstressed [у] as in де[дъ]шка, [бъ]терброд characteristic of representatives of the technical intelligentsia of the young and middle generations; negative attitude to words from the language of officials, such as подвижка “some change in the state of affairs” and конкретика “some specific things”; the ability to “switch in the process of communication from one variety of language to another, depending on the conditions of communication” (Krysin, 2001); and the use of language games (for example, the use of jargon words in the creation of witty sayings). The language of the “lower stratum” has been little explored. In recent years, a number of studies (primarily within the framework of developmental psycholinguistics) have been devoted to the influence of poverty and social disadvantage of a family on the language development of a child. Note, however, the publication of a review on “Language and poverty” in Aleksandrov et al. (2015, pp. 177–245), as well as Rusanova (2017) and Voeikova (2013). 621
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The language of the “social bottom” is still dealt with primarily by lexicographers, researchers of criminals’ (thieves’) jargon or argot (rus. воровское арго). An extensive list of relevant dictionaries is presented in the reference book Who’s Who in Russian Lexicography (Kozyrev & Chernyak, 2016).
Gender The concept of “gender” (rus. гендер, social sex, not equivalent to biological sex) was absent in Soviet linguistics (Kirilina, 2021), but the factor of biological sex (rus. пол) in language was investigated (for details see Belyaeva, 2002; Kuznetsov, 2008; Potapov, 1997; Potapov, 2002; Zemskaya et al., 1989; Zemskaya et al., 1993). In particular, applied areas related to forensic linguistics, diagnostics of authorship and determination of the sex by voice and speech were developed; see, for example, Vul and Goroshko (1992) and Potapova (2000). The concept of “gender” is borrowed from Western sociology and is understood as “a construct based on three groups of characteristics: biological sex, gender stereotypes and the so-called gender display – a variety of manifestations associated with society’s prescribed norms of male and female interaction” (Kuznetsov, 2008, p. 175). Linguistic stereotypes related to gender differences are studied by Russian gender linguistics; for a current review, see Garanovich (2020). In this chapter, we focus primarily on differences due to the biological sex of speakers, which is discussed primarily in sociolinguistic works. The authors agree that the differences between male and female speech are primarily quantitative rather than qualitative, or, in other words, are probabilistic rather than inventory (Krysin, 2021, p. 125; Kuznetsov, 2008, p. 186). The observed differences following Kuznetsov (2008) and Krysin (2021) can be summarized as follows: • Women are more likely to use more prestigious variants, including pronunciations. • There is a higher frequency of expressions “with a connotative component of meaning” in women’s speech (Kuznetsov, 2008, p. 183). • Women use emotionally evaluative vocabulary more often. • There are more diminutives in women’s language. • In men’s speech, there are more expressions that are stylistically inferior and pejorative – men more often use jargon words and expressions and obscene lexis. • Men are more fluent in technical terminology. • Accordingly, the authors describe specific “female expressions” (interjections expressing emotions, evaluative words like прелестный “lovely”) and “male expressions” (for example, дать прикурить “give a light”), including greeting and farewell formulas and appellatives (e.g., the appellatives детка “baby” and милочка “sweety” are described as more characteristic of female speech). • Female speech behaviour is characterized by a greater preference for indirect speech acts (in particular, indirect requests) to direct ones, a greater frequency of polite expressions and softening phrases and a general absence of dominance. Zemskaya et al. (1993, pp. 90–136) previously pointed out that women’s speech is more characterized by phatic speech acts than men’s speech; moreover, in women’s speech, there is less influence of the occupational factor. Differences between male and female speech are increasingly being explored in stylometric studies, which solve the problem of the gender attribution of computer-mediated texts. Thus, Stepanenko and Rezanova (2018) and Stepanenko (2018) proposed the attribution of texts based on the analysis 622
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of “expressive vocabulary”, which includes diminutives (погодка “weather”, телефончик “telephone”), evaluative words with positive and negative evaluation (primarily nouns and adjectives, cf. бесполезный “useless”, красавец “handsome”), words expressing the meaning “very, to a great extent” (cf. грандиозный “grandiose”) and words with repetitions of letters (ураа “hurraah”, фууу “uuugh”). In Romanov and Mescheryakov (2010, 2011), the following features reflecting the author’s style or sex were used as parameters: character n-grams, punctuation marks, emoticons and function words, as well as word length distribution and frequency dictionary, among others. Studies in corpus-based sociolinguistics have made it possible to revise some stereotypical beliefs about male and female speech behaviour. Thus, in Vakhtin and Golovko (2004, p. 72), it is indicated that native speakers of the Russian language hold the opinion that women speak faster and more than men. In Daniel and Zelenkov (2012, p. 118), the average length of utterances is studied as a sociolinguistic variable; the authors showed that “in a situation of private communication, the speaker generates longer utterances when communicating with a person of the same sex; other differences are leveled”, and in public speech, “the female sex of the addressee significantly increases the length of the utterance not only for the male speaker, but also for the female one”, while throughout the studied spoken corpus the average length of a man’s utterance is 26.34 word forms, and the average length of an utterance of a woman is 15.41 word forms.6
Conclusion In this chapter, we discussed only some of the sociolinguistic studies based on Russian corpora (see the list of corpora and resources in Kopotev et al., 2021). Researchers are increasingly using the General Internet Corpus of Russian (GICR or Geekrya, webcorpora.ru) as a data source when analyzing regional variation, male and female speech, and age differences (see, e.g., Belikov et al., 2013; Belikov et al., 2014).
Notes 1 The section “Historical background” is supported by St. Petersburg State University, project #94033528, “Modeling of Russian megalopolis citizens’ communicative behavior in social, speech and pragmatic aspects using artificial intelligence methods”. The remaining sections of this chapter were prepared with the support of RSF grant #19–18–00525, “Understanding official Russian: the legal and linguistic issues”. 2 As indicated in Kryuchkova (2008, p. 9), the phrase “social linguistics” was probably used here for the first time in world linguistics. 3 The website Vastry (https://vastry.ru/) publishes the results of experimental studies of variant phenomena in Russian, carried out mostly by students of the School of Linguistics (HSE University). 4 In this and following sections examples are given in Cyrillic script. Readers are directed to a recent Russian grammar (such as Wade, 2020) for help with transliteration if needed. 5 At the same time, the everyday speech of an official has all the main characteristics of colloquial speech, described in the works of Lapteva, Zemskaya and others. 6 In the cited study, “utterance” refers to a fragment of a single interlocutor’s speech until the speaker changes or the end of the document (that is, in terms of conversation analysis, the authors measured the length of the turns).
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Olga Blinova et al. Yunakovskaya, A. A. (2011). “Jazyk goroda” kak lingvisticheskaja problema [“Urban language” as a linguistic problem]. Vestnik Omskogo universiteta [Bulletin of Omsk University], 3, 193‒197. Zaslavskaya, T. I. (1997). Social’naja struktura sovremennogo rossijskogo obshhestva [The social structure of modern Russian society]. Obshhestvennye nauki i sovremennost’ [Social Sciences and Modernity], 2, 5–23. Zemskaya, E. A. (Ed.). (1973). Russkaja razgovornaja rech’ [Russian colloquial speech]. Nauka. Zemskaya, E. A. (1979). Russkaja razgovornaja rech’: lingvisticheskij analiz i problemy obuchenija [Russian colloquial speech: Linguistic analysis and learning problems]. Russkiy jazyk. Zemskaya, E. A. (Ed.). (1996). Russkij jazyk konca XX stoletija (1985–1995) [The Russian language of the end of the XXth century (1985–1995)]. Jazyki russkoj kul’tury. Zemskaya, E. A., Kitaygorodskaya, M. A., & Rozanova, N. N. (1993). Osobennosti muzhskoj i zhenskoj rechi [Features of male and female speech]. In E. A. Zemskaya & D. N Shmelev (Eds.), Russkij jazyk v jego funkcionirovanii. Kommunikativno-pragmaticheskij aspekt [Russian language in its functioning. Communicative and pragmatic aspect] (pp. 90–135). Nauka Publ. Zemskaya, E. A., Kitaygorodskaya, M. V., & Rozanova, N. N. (1989). O chem i kak govorjat zhenshhiny i muzhchiny [What and how women and men talk]. Russkaja rech’ [Russian Speech], 1, 42–46. Zemskaya, E. A., Kitaygorodskaya, M. V., & Shiryaev, E. N. (1981). Russkaja razgovornaja rech’: Obshhie voprosy. Slovoobrazovanie. Sintaksis [Russian colloquial speech: General issues. Word-formation. Syntax]. Nauka Publ. Zemskaya, E. A., & Shmelev, D. N. (Eds.). (1984). Gorodskoe prostorechie: Problemy izuchenija [Urban popular language: Problems of study]. Nauka Publ. Zhirmunsky, V. M. (1936). Nacional’nyj jazyk i social’nye dialekty [National language and social dialects]. Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo “Hudozhestvennaja literatura”. Zhuravleva, A. E. (2022). Sovremennye tendencii v proiznoshenii grupp soglasnyh [Current trends in the pronunciation of consonant groups]. Uchenye zapiski Petrozavodskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta [Proceedings of Petrozavodsk State University], 4(1), 13–19.
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53 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN UKRAINE Olga Ivanova
Introduction Not surprisingly, Ukraine’s sociolinguistic situation has undergone substantial changes in the past thirty years. The events of the last decade, from 2013 on, have triggered large-scale qualitative changes in the Ukrainian linguistic dynamics, which resolves around a close and interwoven contact of two major languages: Ukrainian and Russian. This sociolinguistic reality dates back centuries and scholars agree that its evolution could not be defined other than as shifting. The historical sociocultural development of Ukraine, or at least of its important part,1 was essentially determined by its political status: first, as a part of the Kingdom of Russia (1654–1771) and the Russian Empire (1772–1917); second, as a part of the Soviet Union (1922–1991); and, finally, as an independent state (1991–present). Understanding the sociolinguistic situation of Ukraine, thus, implies inquiring into three key issues: (i) how language policy and planning (LPP) were designed and implemented under different political circumstances in Ukraine throughout history; (ii) how the Ukrainian language situation adjusted to such historical socio-political casuistry and, particularly, how this language situation evolved; and, finally, (iii) what sociolinguistic shifts are in place in Ukraine considering its current socio-political situation.
Languages of Ukraine Ukrainian is the titular and the only state language of Ukraine, and it is defined as such by the Constitution of Ukraine (1996). Yet, despite being a de jure monolingual country, Ukraine is a de facto multilingual state (Csernicskó, 2013), with more than 130 ethnic groups making up its population2 (Csernicskó & Fedinec, 2016). Even so, its most outstanding sociolinguistic feature accounts for the social coexistence of two major languages: Ukrainian and Russian. Both belong to the East Slavonic language group, Indo-European language family, and use the Cyrillic alphabet, allowing for high level of intercomprehension. Indeed, only approximately 3% of the whole population would not understand either Ukrainian or Russian (Shulga, 2008). Ukrainian and Russian are ‘large’ languages in terms of the number of speakers. Yet, compared to Russian, Ukrainian may be defined as a ‘small’ language (Moser, 2014): it is widely spoken in Ukraine and in diaspora, while Russian is among the ten leading World languages with approximately 338 million speakers (Zabrodskaja & Ivanova, 2021). Historically, and 631
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today, sociolinguistics in Ukraine is framed within a language problem consisting of “balancing the status and scopes of use of the country’s most widespread languages, Ukrainian and Russian” (Kulyk, 2013, p. 280). The main sociolinguistic problem of Ukraine is the definition of the role of Ukrainian as the principle mean of nation and identity construction, and the determination of the status Russian language is to be granted in this scenario (Csernicskó & Máté, 2017). Thus, most studies on Ukrainian sociolinguistics revolve around the phenomenon of UkrainianRussian bilingualism.
Key concepts of Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism is probably the most prominent feature of the Ukrainian sociolinguistic landscape. The typology and the extent of this bilingualism significantly depends on the geography and on the socio-political history of each Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian is the main native language in the country, and Ukrainians make up the dominant ethnic group; yet, the presence of ethnic Russians is also high, and the use of the Russian language is very extensive. According to the last National Census of Ukraine (2001), up to 80% of all the adult population can fluently speak the other language in addition to their native language, and almost every Ukrainian is bilingual, though to a varying degree (Bilaniuk, 2010; Ivanova, 2011). One of the main stumbling blocks in defining bilingualism in Ukraine is the undisguised dissociation between ethnic identification, language identification, and language use. Most Ukrainians live in ethnically and linguistically mixed territories (Taranenko, 2007), and ethnic identity is not unequivocally associated with what speakers would consider their native language and what language they would prefer to use (Kulyk, 2013). Many ethnic Ukrainians are Russian-speakers and, to a lesser extent, vice versa (Pop-Eleches & Robertson, 2018), and this situation is perfectly compatible with a widespread view of Ukraine as a homeland. Thus, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, Ukrainians may be roughly classified into three groups: Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and Russian-speaking Russians, in this order of dominance (Melnyk & Chernychko, 2010).3 This peculiar sociolinguistic feature, in which language identification is not necessarily equal to preferred language, is considered as a ‘persistent legacy’ of the Soviet national policy (Kulyk, 2018). The situation itself is suggested to result from the current perception of the Ukrainian language as a symbol of Ukraine, similarly to the anthem and the flag (Melnyk & Chernychko, 2010), within a so-called iconization process (Irvine & Gal, 2000). Patterns of language contact in Ukraine range from almost harmonious bilingualism to almost complete monolingualism. Two key historical concepts for understanding this shifting nature of bilingualism are Russification and Ukrainization. Russification is defined as a top-down process consisting in the promotion of the use of Russian in all spheres of life – though specifically in public spheres – at the expense of Ukrainian. There were several waves of Russification during the history of Ukraine, with a more overt program during the Imperial era and more covert form during the Soviet period (Goodman, 2009). Ukrainization is defined as a reconstruction of the use of Ukrainian in different contexts. Also referred to as de-Russification, this process pursues a reversion to a ‘national norm’, that is, a reduction in the role of the Russian language in spheres other than as a language of its eponymous ethnic minority (Kulyk, 2018). Importantly, the waves of Russification and Ukrainization significantly affected and shaped social attitudes to Ukrainian and Russian. Outlining these processes is crucial for understanding the shifting nature of language revitalization in independent Ukraine, particularly, the still weighty social presence of Russian. 632
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Origins and evolution of Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism Ukrainian, Russian, and Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism throughout the history of Ukraine The origins of Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism go back to the first socio-political era when Ukrainian territories were under Russian rule, mainly, to the Kingdom of Russia (1654–1771) and the Russian Empire (1772–1917). The first social contact between the two languages was marked by the imposition of Russian at the expense of Ukrainian within the first wave of Russification. Scholars do not agree on either the intensity or the intentionality of the Imperial Russification, however. While some claim that it was particularly severe in duration, consistency, and constancy (Danylenko & Naienko, 2019), others defend its unstable and shifting in intensity nature (Pavlenko, 2011). Either way, historical Russification forced the Ukrainian language out of use in favor of Russian (Taranenko, 2007) and strove for assimilation of Ukrainians with Russians. The shared belonging of Ukrainian and Russian languages to the East Slavonic language group served as a strong premise for that process (Masenko, 2009). Soviet Russification (1922–1991) was conducted in a different way. The Soviet era started positively for the Ukrainian language: under the Ukrainization launched in the 1920s, Ukrainian was revived in education, the press, book-publishing, cultural activities including literature, or science, and reached important stages of standardization (Shapoval, 2017/2018). However, from the 1930s on, Russian was promoted throughout the Soviet republics as a language of interethnic integration and social mobility (Kulyk, 2013) and, thus, as a language of prestige. As a result, Ukrainian was significantly displaced from many communicative contexts and speakers started to perceive it as a language with narrow functions and low social prestige (Shapoval, 2017/2018). Importantly, Russian was not formally recognized as official during the Soviet era, but its status as the language of international communication and the total control over Soviet republics made the Soviet Russification a fruitful and intensive process (Masenko, 2009). It is revealing that during Soviet times linguistic research on Ukrainian was mainly limited to several ideologically driven questions, mainly, the ‘beneficial’ influence of Russian on Ukrainian and the harmonious nature of Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism (Shapoval, 2017/2018). Russification was replaced by Ukrainization with the independence of Ukraine (1991). However, considering that Ukrainization has been homogeneous and constant throughout the thirty years of independence would be an overgeneralization. In Ukraine, the language question is “fraught with political connotations” (Diuk, 2013, p. 189; also Pavlenko, 2008), so the orientation and the intensity of Ukrainization has significantly depended on political casuistry. Since 1991, Ukraine has adopted an LPP framework aimed at the promotion of Ukrainian as the titular and, thus, the only national language of the country, but its scope was not regular. The ambivalent LPP under President Kuchma’s mandate (1994–2006) was followed by pro-Ukrainian Viktor Yushchenko’s policy (2005–2010), and this was in turn followed by pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich’s commission (2010–2013). LPP from 2014 to the present has been marked by continuous ups and downs. Accordingly, Ukrainian was promoted in some relevant contexts, like education or business, but in many other spheres – like mass media – its use still competes with Russian (cf. Goodman, 2009; Nedashkivska, 2010).
Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism and linguistic phenomena Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism gave rise to some interesting sociolinguistic traits. Among others, it generated a unique Ukrainian phenomenon known as Surzhyk. Usually perceived negatively by speakers themselves, Surzhyk (which means ‘impure language’ in Ukrainian) is defined as a mixed code resulting from the combination of Ukrainian and Russian possibly at all language levels, 633
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including grammar, lexicon, and phonetics. Interestingly, Surzhyk is not a uniform phenomenon, but rather consists of a continuum of mixed language varieties, or sociolects (Zbyr, 2015). According to a global social study in 2004, 10.7% of Ukrainian adult population spoke Surzhyk and most of them lived in South-Central, Western-Central, Southern, and Eastern Ukraine (Khmelko, 2004). Among scholars, Surzhyk is considered as a postcolonial phenomenon formed after a prolonged and intensive interference between Ukrainian and Russian (Melnyk & Chernychko, 2010). Some scientific voices are particularly critical about Surzhyk, which they refer to as “an incestuous child of bilingualism” (Andrukhovych, 2001). The asymmetrical nature of Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism is another peculiarity of the Ukrainian linguistic situation (Kulyk, 2015; Masenko, 2009). The asymmetry mainly relies on an uneven proficiency of different ethnolinguistic groups in either of the languages. Importantly, these are mainly ethnic Ukrainians who tend to be the true bilinguals and shift to Russian when necessary; whereas most ethnic Russians would only actively use Russian (Melnyk & Chernychko, 2010; Ivanova, 2011). In this line, we cannot forget one more sociolinguistic phenomenon in the making: the formation of a Ukrainian variety of Russian. Russian is a pluricentric language and, as such, has developed a national variety in Ukraine. Ukrainian Russian is characterized by some features taken from Ukrainian, specifically in phonetics and lexicon, although some syntactic loans are in place (Moser, 2014). Still understudied, Ukrainian Russian is attracting scientific attention as a new nondominant variety of Russian formed after independence in 1991 (cf. Del Gaudio & Ivanova, 2013).
Sociolinguistic variation of Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism As stated earlier, not all Ukrainians are bilingual: Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism takes different forms according to different extralinguistic variables. Geographic background explains much of this variation, and so do the urban/rural division, age and gender, and diaphasia (variation across degrees of formality).
Geographical variation One of the most widely accepted positions on sociolinguistic variation in Ukraine refers to the geographical distribution of languages. However, interpreting it as ‘geographic’ only would be a terminological oversimplification: geography in Ukraine implies noteworthy sociocultural differences, of which not only specialists but Ukrainians themselves are conscious (Beliaeva & Seals, 2020). Geopolitics in Ukraine is, thus, geolinguistic: it is the geographical area of residence that leads processes like preference, assimilation, accommodation, or integration towards Ukrainian, Russian, or both. Many studies have tried to trace isoglosses between more Ukrainian and more Russian-speaking territories of Ukraine (cf. Ivanova, 2013; Vyshnyak, 2009). In very generic terms, it may be safe to speak of the profoundly Ukrainian character of the Western Ukraine, where Russification was historically almost nonexistent, and most Central Ukraine, although Russified still weighted towards the use of Ukrainian. Western Ukraine was annexed to the USSR only during World War II and here Ukrainian had always enjoyed functional plenitude (Masenko, 2009). Eastern and Southern Ukraine are predominantly Russian-speaking for several reasons: a high proportion of Russian migrants and ethnic Russians, historically closer contacts with Russia at all levels, a large number of Ukrainian-Russian mixed families, and a greater and longer presence of Russian government representatives for economic reasons (these are, after all, the most industrially powerful areas of the country; the South, moreover, had always been very attractive as a tourist destination). 634
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In these latter territories, the type of bilingualism is often defined as predominantly passive (cf. Lakhtikova, 2017). Although a crude division (Kulyk, 2018), this isogloss is relatively reliable for demonstrating global geolinguistic variation in Ukraine. Indeed, the National Census of Ukraine (2001) showed a clear predominance of Ukrainian as native language in Western and Central areas (80–100%) and a significant decline in its consideration as such towards the East and the South. The validity of this division can be seen in the sociolinguistic trends of recent years. The increase in the identification with and support for Ukrainian has begun in almost all parts of Ukraine, but the intensity of this process is clearly region-dependent: it is more pronounced in the Center, but less intensive in the East and South (Kulyk, 2017/2018). Geographical variation is also important in Surzhyk, since the more Russian-speaking the territories are, the more common this mixed code is. Against Ukrainian-speaking Western Ukraine, the majority of the Surzhyk-using population is concentrated in the more Russian-speaking Eastern and Central areas of the country (Zbyr (2015) reports up to 21.7% of adult speakers).
Urban/rural variation Although less explored, urban/rural variation in Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism does exist. Before the socio-political changes of the last decade, the variation in this aspect was relatively stable, in particular for areas with a strong Russian language presence: for many speakers, the Ukrainian language was associated with rurality, while Russian was conceived of as a highly civilized and culturally loaded language. This division was considerably supported by the Soviet LPP, which promoted Ukrainian-language schools in the villages and Russian-language schools in the cities (Goodman, 2009). Indeed, many Southern, Central, and Eastern cities of Ukraine, contrary to villages in the same areas, are Russian-speaking. The origin of the urban/rural divide in the East and the South lies in the predominant migration from Russia to industrialized and developed cities and towns (Zbyr, 2015). The Ukrainian countryside remained non-Russified for most of its history, and, importantly, until the end of the Soviet era, Ukrainian was the common language of the rural areas all throughout country. Russian, by contrast, dominated in many Ukrainian cities (Onuch & Hale, 2018), with the main exception of the Western areas. Importantly, despite recent changes, associations can still be found between rurality, low socioeconomic status, and the use of Ukrainian (Onuch & Hale, 2018). Indeed, in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, Ukrainian was mainly limited to rural areas (Masenko, 2009), and such attitudes are still current among a large part of the population, particularly among older speakers. The existence of Surzhyk plays an important role in the generation of these attitudes, since, as a phenomenon, it is directly associated with the Ukrainian language (Melnyk & Chernychko, 2010), and, thus, with low education and low social status.
Gender and age variation Despite being important variables for sociolinguistics, age and gender have been less explored in Ukraine. As in most post-Soviet states, age could make an important difference between speakers’ language practices and attitudes. In Ukraine, in large part, such cohort effect would be expected because the Ukrainian education system has undergone an almost complete transition to Ukrainian. In the last thirty years, this has been conducive to the generation of a greater inclusion of Ukrainian in many domains, coupled with the development of a sense of national identity and new attitudes (cf. Kulyk, 2015). 635
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The few studies focusing on age differences in Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism revealed linguistic redistribution rather than linguistic change per se. Indeed, younger Ukrainians have a better self-assessed proficiency in Ukrainian, especially in Western and Central Ukraine, but they also report a higher proficiency in Russian, sometimes even over older speakers. Strikingly, the preference for historically predominant languages is also intensifying: young Ukrainians use more Ukrainian in the West and the Center, but they also use more Russian in the East and the South (Kulyk, 2015). Furthermore, in today’s Ukraine, there are still many speakers considering Russian as a more valuable language. As a result, a survey from the 2000s showed that speakers under thirty, raised and schooled in already independent Ukraine, relied on Russian as frequently as speakers born and socialized in the USSR (Kulyk, 2013). Thus, concerning age factor, no significant quantitative changes are to be yet reported in Ukraine (Shevchuk-Kliuzheva, 2020). Young Ukrainians tend to maintain the general trends of language practices in their sociolinguistic areas and only middle-aged Ukrainians, mainly involved in very intensive social and work activities, show a kind of accommodation by partially increasing bilingual practices (Ivanova, 2013). By way of prediction, a similar situation can be expected to endure over time. As a recent study from Shevchuk-Kliuzheva (2020) reports, while most parents report using only one language in the family (almost 50% report Ukrainian), against only 17.9% of those who use both Ukrainian and Russian, approximately 60% of parents declare that their children can switch from Ukrainian to Russian and vice versa, thus showing active bilingualism. In this context, it is relevant to ask whether men and women assume different roles in the management of linguistic identity and language use, in line with what sociolinguistic theory would suggest. At the beginning of 2000s, attitudes to Ukrainian were more critical among Ukrainian women than men, especially in the periphery, arguably because of more opportunities Russian could grant them as a language of social power. One probable explanation may lie in a more subordinate social position of women in Ukrainian society (Bilaniuk, 2003). Yet, as expected, other social variables can influence gender preferences in Ukraine. For example, a sociolinguistic study in Kyiv (Ivanova, 2011) showed that women of high socio-cultural level act as a breakthrough group by intensifying the use of Ukrainian in many communicative contexts, in opposition to the rest of speakers.
Contextual distribution of Ukrainian and Russian Strictly speaking, Ukrainian-Russian diglossia is not uniform. When Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, diglossia was close to a classic model, with Russian being dominant in most public contexts. During the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, Ukrainian gained force in many contexts, while Russian maintained its positions even in some highly formal contexts, for example, administration (specifically in the Eastern and Southern parts). The spread of both Ukrainian and Russian in so many different contexts, in particular, in social interaction and in mass media, ‘deformed’ the historical variation in language use (cf. Matviyishyn & Michalski, 2018). To describe the diglossia of the 2010s, Ivanova (2011) introduced the term crossed diglossia, by which she referred to a social acceptance of both languages in almost all public context of use. In fact, before the socio-political events of the last decade, Ukrainian and Russian shared many contexts, with only some of them being more Ukrainized (namely, administration and education) and some of them, even more Russified (for example, mass-media (Matviyishyn & Michalski, 2018) or mass-culture (Melnyk & Chernychko, 2010)). Recently, an interesting term was proposed to describe how language use in Ukraine is accommodated by the social circumstances and language social, cultural, and political associations: 636
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language embeddedness. For example, embedding in a Ukrainian-speaking environment not only triggers the use of Ukrainian regardless of a speaker’s preferred language, but also favors the activation and adherence to norms, structures, and viewpoints associated with Ukrainian (Onuch & Hale, 2018). Another interesting phenomenon derived from language contact in Ukraine is nonaccommodating bilingualism, consisting in the practical use of the preferred language – either Ukrainian or Russian – regardless of the language used by the interlocutor (Bilaniuk, 2010). Nonaccommodating bilingualism entails both positive and negative consequences. While, on the one hand, it facilitates the greater contextual integration of Ukrainian, enhances bilingual dominance, and eases tensions among speakers, it slows down, on the other hand, the expansion of Ukrainian in certain communicative contexts, where speakers feel legitimized to continue using Russian.
The new sociolinguistic agenda in the independent Ukraine As in other post-Soviet states, after 1991 the language policy of Ukraine was mainly framed within the process of political de-Russification. The orientation and intensity of LPP in its different stages played a central role in the reordering of language uses and attitudes.
Political shifts and language shifts of the last decades After the independence of Ukraine in 1991, several socio-political milestones had a direct impact on the Ukrainian sociolinguistic situation: the Orange Revolution (2004), the Revolution of Dignity, also known as Euromaidan (2013–2014), and the Russian war against Ukraine (began in 2022). The main linguistic issue raised within these political movements concerned the legal status of Russian in Ukraine and the possible effect it may have on the vitality of Ukrainian. During the 2000s, including the post-Orange era, few significant changes were observed in the sociolinguistic situation in Ukraine. To a large extent, the understanding of the historical sociolinguistic situation in Ukraine played an important role in the maintenance of a moderate, non-decisive LPP during these years. Political agents understood that a more intensive promotion of Ukrainian would not be supported by Eastern and Southern Ukraine, while moves towards a greater official recognition of Russian would be frowned upon in both Western and Central Ukraine (Melnyk & Chernychko, 2010). Euromaidan, or the Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014), had much of its origin in the language question, which actually can be seen as one of the main causes of the successive conflict in Eastern Ukraine (Csernicskó & Máté, 2017). After Euromaidan (2013–2014), Ukrainian significantly intensified its symbolic and identity role as the language of the Ukrainian nation (Kulyk, 2016), although some scholars prefer to define it as a ‘rallying-around-the-flag’ effect, rather than as a significant shift in ethnolinguistic aspects, still not static (Pop-Eleches & Robertson, 2018). Some large-scale surveys (Kulyk, 2018), however, showed that changes were far-reaching in the identification, language use, and attitudes of Ukrainians, within a so-called ‘bottom-up de-Russification’, consisting in a drifting away from Russianness (but not necessarily consisting in the absolute rejection of the Russian language compared with the rejection of the Russian nation). Results can be seen in that most Ukrainians support an LPP fostering both the symbolic and functional prominence of Ukrainian, even though their expectation with regard to the degree of such functional prominence can be different (Kulyk, 2018). Even the Russian-speaking population advocates for the LPP of one national language, Ukrainian, against a less dominant – up to 30% – support for an LPP recognizing two state languages (Melnyk & Chernychko, 2010; Vyshnyak, 2008) or granting Russian a special status in historically Russian-speaking areas (Kulyk, 2017/2018). 637
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At present, and since 2015, the analysis of LPP in Ukraine is a considerably complicated task. As a highly politized question, recognized by the politicians themselves as “a problem threatening national unity”, Ukrainian LPP has not achieved a valid solution for its linguistic situation so far (Csernicskó & Máté, 2017, p. 20). Despite serious attempts at its critical analysis (Besters-Dilger, 2009; Csernicskó & Ferenc, 2016; Csernicskó, 2017; Moser, 2014; Reznik, 2018; to mention just a few), it remains to be seen what direction the new LPP in Ukraine will take and what sociolinguistic changes it will trigger. For many speakers, the balance between Ukrainian and Russian is still ‘tenuous’, since either of the languages conveys a symbolic value related to political and cultural allegiances (Bilaniuk & Melnyk, 2008).
Language practices and attitudes to Ukrainian Language is in the core of identity negotiation, and in today’s Ukraine the language issue is the most identifying social factor. Ukrainian national identity passed through different stages during the past thirty years. Since 1991, it has been in transition in Kuzio’s terms (2007), but it definitely shifted towards a global Ukrainization, and the othering of Russian, since Euromaidan (2013–2014) (Beliaeva & Seals, 2020). At the same time, de-Russification did not reach the expected levels: Russian still prevails in economic and media contexts, and it is not rare to hear Russian in public administration either (Csernicskó & Máté, 2017). This situation is even reflected in scientific literature, where a number of interesting (and emotionally charged) terms were coined. Among such, one can find the term linguicide, referring to the historical language regulation to the detriment of Ukrainian. In any case, analyses of recent years show positive attitudes towards both languages among the Ukrainians themselves. In the middle 2000s, a focus survey showed that both Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking Ukrainians do not mind the presence of the other language provided they could freely use their preferred one (Kulyk, 2013). For most Ukrainians, both Ukrainian and Russian are important languages, though for different reasons. The social status of Ukrainian is associated with its role as the only state language and, thus, language representing the country, and its central position in formal communicative contexts. The social status of Russian is mainly related to its common understanding all over Ukraine and its nature of lingua franca across post-Soviet space (Kulyk, 2017/2018). One of the most intriguing, and challenging, questions in modern Ukraine is the construction of language identity. The historic conditions described earlier fostered the coexistence of various language identity profiles, which combine language identification (attachment) and language use (practice) that do not always coincide. Recent events, especially those after Euromaidan (2013–2014), triggered a stronger sense of identity in a more unified Ukraine (Pop-Eleches & Robertson, 2018). Interestingly, a highly growing shift to consider oneself Ukrainian and the Ukrainian language as a native (or own) language, did not immediately lead to the growth in the actual use of Ukrainian: based on a comparative national survey Kulyk (2018) did not find the de-Russificiation in language use that one would expect after such shifting sociopolitical events. Interestingly, as proposed by the same author in the same period (Kulyk, 2017/2018, p. 265), this situation can be defined as “the enigma of language politics in contemporary Ukraine”: Russian continues to play an important role in society despite having no legal recognition beyond the equivalent of a minority language, and Ukrainian is not increasing its presence in a way that is to be expected despite being the country’s only state language.
Conclusions Ukraine is currently living through an important sociolinguistic shift because of the turbulent socio-political events of the past three decades. It remains to be seen what changes the current war, 638
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started on February 24, 2022, will bring about in the sociolinguistic situation in Ukraine. It is at least possible to predict that they will be significant and long term. The scope of these changes will certainly expand to the three most important aspects of Ukrainian sociolinguistics: (i) the building of Ukrainian LPP; (ii) the social use of Ukrainian and Russian, and the situation with UkrainianRussian bilingualism; and (iii) the management of identity and attitudes towards both languages, their use, and their social and ideological role. Some shortcomings in the study of Ukrainian sociolinguistics must now be highlighted. Among empirical constraints, the most important one is the practical impossibility to access data and speakers living in the Ukrainian territories annexed or occupied by Russia (such as the Crimean Peninsula or the Donbas area). The macro-studies could no longer include data from these territories from 2014 on (cf. Kulyk, 2017/2018; Kulyk, 2018). The second important aspect has to do with the reliability of data sociolinguists can obtain in their surveys. As discussed earlier, the language question in Ukraine revolves around several key concepts, all of them concerning language to some extent: identity, nationality, ethnicity, and language use. Speakers’ reports on language use and preferences may not necessarily reflect their actual language practices, but rather their stance towards identification with Ukrainian. By way of a final word, the following definition proposed by Kulyk (2018) on the basis of his analysis of sociolinguistic change after Euromaidan (2013/2014) is still valid: Ukraine keeps on being a bilingual country, where Russian still plays the role of an important means of communication and means of access to information and culture. This year’s events are bound to have a profound effect on the sociolinguistic situation in Ukraine and, in particular, on attitudes and linguistic practices in diaspora, which is one of the least explored topics at present.
Notes 1 The geopolitics of Ukraine was not stable throughout the course of history. Historically, the territories of today’s Ukraine were part of different political unions at the same time, most notably the Russian Empire (Eastern Ukraine), the Polish Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Western Ukraine). 2 According to the last National Census of Ukraine (2001), 16 ‘major’ different languages were claimed by Ukrainians as native. In addition to Ukrainian (67.53%) and Russian (29.59%), Crimean Tartar, Moldavian, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Belarusian, Armenian, Gagauz, Romani, Polish, German, Slovak, Jewish, and Greek were mentioned as native. A small part of the population mentioned another language (0.30%) or did not specify any (0.42%). 3 Some studies (e.g. Khmelko, 2004) would add a fourth group: the so-called Surzhyk-speaking Ukrainians, or Ukrainians using a unique mixed language formed as a result of interference between Ukrainian and Russian.
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54 SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN THE BALTIC STATES Language dynamics research Gabrielle Hogan-Brun and Ineta Dabašinskienė
This chapter gives an overview of the main directions of a contemporary Baltic scholarship on languages in the region over the past decade, with emphasis on the most urgent topics. We highlight research on language policy and practices, on ideology perspectives, including minority issues, and on the status of the titular languages. We also introduce emerging topics, methodological and theoretical approaches taken in Baltic research on intergroup communication, questions of identity, language attitudes, first and second language acquisition, youth language and the role of English (and Russian). Among the hottest theoretical topics discussed are multilingualism, superdiversity (of languages), translanguaging, literacy of new speakers in various sociolinguistic domains and language management theory with focus on various social actors’ power, attitudes and metalinguistic activities regarding “language problems”. Other, more practical matters tackled include speakers’ linguistic biographies, controversial issues of language use, non-professionals’ views on languages and language-related topics, and multilingual and multimodal texts in cityscapes as authentic texts for educational purposes. The previous edition of this Handbook contained an overview of Baltic sociolinguistics research up to around 2010. This contribution adds further details on research published at the start of the millennium that compares the region’s language situation from different angles. There is also a brief discussion of cross-Baltic sociolinguistic networking that promoted the exchange of information on language policy and practice during that period.
The millennium’s early scholarly treatment of language and society in the region The development of Baltic language policy and practices attracted attention from numerous western scholars in the first decade of the millennium, with much interest on the use of language and culture as a means of state rebuilding across the region, on language acquisition and proficiency, on language in education and on the use of the state languages in different sociolinguistic domains. Considerable focus has also been on language policy, language rights and language testing for citizenship. Several authors lent their support to evolving language policies in the Baltic; others criticised it. In the run-up to Baltic EU accession there were numerous commentaries on the effect DOI: 10.4324/9781003198345-60 642
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upon (language) policy and (language) ideological debates in the Baltic states. For a cross-Baltic review of this sociolinguistic literature see Hogan-Brun (2005) and Savickienė (2006). In each republic, the issues of language rights and language planning remained focused on those of the majority as well as those of minority language groups (that were overshadowed in the changed sociolinguistic reality). Sometimes, scholars described the matter in terms not of a clearly defined theory of language rights but of specific sociolinguistic issues such as language conflicts, language maintenance and shift (these trajectories are still pursued, mainly in Latvia and Lithuania). An evaluation of the scholarly treatment of Baltic language policy issues and its complexities is presented in Hogan-Brun et al. (2007).
Cross-Baltic perspectives since 2010 Long-lasting Baltic cooperation has resulted in a number of significant publications. The collection Multilingualism in the Baltic States (eds Lazdiņa & Marten, 2019) provides an overview of linguistic diversity, societal discourses and interaction between speakers of majority and minority languages in the Baltic States. Contributions cover a wide range of research topics and methods, including folk linguistics, discourse analysis, narrative analyses, code alternation, ethnographic observations, language learning motivation, languages in education and language acquisition. Regional varieties and minority languages (Latgalian in Latvia, Võro in Estonia, Polish in Lithuania, also urban dialects) and the competing roles of Russian and English are also examined. An earlier publication on realities and perceptions of multilingualism in the Baltic states is Veisbergs (2013). Another more recent compilation, Multilingual Practices in the Baltic Countries (ed. Verschik, 2021), gives an overview of empirical Baltic sociolinguistics research. Case studies contained in the compilation cover language practices in the family (language maintenance and shift) and language contact at school, in the context of migration (heritage language maintenance, language attrition), as well as through virtual social networks and platforms (such as Facebook, or blogs). Language choice on the visual plane has also been explored, using multilingual linguistic landscapes (LL), and highlighting practical and/or commercial considerations made in cityscapes and tourist resorts (which have to conform with official language policy). In addition to a body of research on intergroup communication, cross-Baltic perspectives have also looked into language planning and policy between the opposing forces of globalisation and localisation. This has focused on the vitality and sustainability of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian, and of the regional languages Võro and Latgalian and also Livonian (in Latvia). There has been a series of analyses on the status, recognition and emancipation of indigenous language communities in the wake of a paradigm shift in research post EU accession (in 2004).
Estonia Research on Estonia’s sociolinguistic context has mainly focused on contact-induced language changes (contact linguistics), and on language maintenance and shift in the private and public domains. In Southern Estonia, work has been done on language use in the public discourse, and on wider social dimensions of language vitality and identity. Information on published work and ongoing projects by Estonian scholars can be viewed on the following research portal: www.etis. ee/Portal/Persons/Index?lang=ENG. Research on language use in Estonian language contacts has primarily been focused on language choice. Here and in the following paragraphs, we will provide an explicit reference to a few works. Some studies have looked into aspects of translanguaging and home literacy in 643
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multilingual family settings, pupils’ language behaviour patterns in interactions with educators, and language preferences among mixed couples. There have also been investigations into modes of code-switching in bilingual children, language use patterns among youth in multilingual communication as well as of returnees to, and newcomers in, Estonia. Other studies have traced instances of code-switching and code-copying among speakers of typologically distant languages (EstonianRussian, for example). Also examined were ways of relying on (mediated) receptive multilingualism as a mode of communication in language-diverse settings. In other studies, linguistic landscaping has been deployed as a means of exploring issues of (Russian-Estonian) power relations, and to compare multilingual and multimodal aspects thereof in the diverse cityscapes of Tallinn and Vilnius. A further strand of work, on language use on the Web, has traced instances of Estonian-English code-copying and code-alternation in fashion blogs. This sees online language choice patterns as dependent on a combination of individual, technological and textual factors. Overall, there seems to be some recognition of code-switching as an enriching resource. Language ecological investigations are ongoing into the sustainability of Estonian in the era of globalisation. This has moved from a focus on language vitality and collective identity construction in intergroup settings (Ehala, 2017) to information society’s interaction patterns of global, national and minority languages, and issues of language value and utilitarianism. Within a Europewide framework, experimental research has been conducted into Estonia’s “new speakers”, mobile multilingual citizens, their means of negotiating social boundaries, re-evaluation of linguistic competence and ways of adapting to new and overlapping linguistic spaces. The vitality of (Finnic) Võro, an endangered variety of Estonian that is seeking recognition as a regional language, was also studied (Koreinik, 2013). Focused on (using as analytical parameters capacity, opportunity, desire and language products) were its socio-cultural status, its use in specific (cultural, educational) domains, in tourism and as a heritage language, as well as speakers’ identity beliefs and code-switching practices with Northern Estonians. Analytical proof was obtained of Võro’s ongoing language shift from Estonian-Võro bilingualism to the use of Estonian only, and of its predominant use in the older generation through declining intergenerational transmission (Koreinik, 2013). Similar to the case of Livonian in Latvia (see following section), its revival potential through interactive media is being followed up on as a possible, if locally desired, opportunity.
Latvia The development of sociolinguistics in Latvia has been influenced by three factors: changes in language education policy (and practice, particularly affecting first-language teaching); a focus on endangered languages (mainly indigenous Livonian and regional Latgalian); the use of digital methods in humanities (for language resources, ancient written texts, etc.). These are among topics treated in a recent collection of sociolinguistic studies based on quantitative and qualitative survey results of the Language Situation in Latvia (Kļava, 2018). Relevant entries on sociolinguistic and linguistic landscape studies in Latvia can also be found in the latest version of Latvia’s National Encyclopedia (2020/21). Language use developments, a primary political concern, are under close scrutiny in Latvia. A battery of sociolinguistic surveys launched during the last decade was commissioned by the Latvian Language Agency (Latviešu valodas aģentūra, or LVA). Under investigation were the language situation in Latvia (2010–2015), language ideology and media (2014), Latvian language learning and issues of state language testing, as well as attitudes towards 644
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Latvian and its learning. Much of this research is made available on the LVA website https:// valoda.lv/en/projects/, with recommendations on language education to relevant social actors (policy makers, teachers, parents, textbook authors and pupils). The latest results of a national research program on the Latvian language (2018–2021; www. izm.gov.lv/lv/media/5818/download) are presented as an open resource. Digitally publicised, its results are intended for use in education and for language learning, aiming to strengthen the role and functions of Latvian and Livonian. Other aspects of national identity were treated in a collection of articles (Druviete, 2018) covering diverse topics such as state language status and language policy, public discussions and attitudes towards modern personal names, city research in Europe and cityscape advertising in the context of multimodality and geo-semiotics theories. Recent sociolinguistic dissertations and other published outputs by young scholars have been branching out into a range of new regional work, pointing to a widening scope in capacity building. There is a focus on language and its functionality in the urban public space, across the Baltic, using a linguistic landscape approach and drawing on localisation theory. Also covered are aspects of migration processes from the angle of superdiversity, language policy, language rights and integration, newcomers’ linguistic experiences and attitudes of and towards them and their languages. There has also been an examination of national and institutional language policy documents, from the perspective of language management theory. Dissertation abstracts are available on the University of Latvia webpage: http://dspace.lu.lv/dspace/handle/7/46470 The recently founded Livonian Institute, working under the auspices of the University of Latvia and the Microsoft Innovation Centre, has become a significant social actor in the Latvian scientific arena for studies of Livonian. Several research projects are under way, assessing the spoken and written forms of Livonian, its vitality as a critically endangered language and its revitalisation potential through communication technology (Druviete & Kļava, 2018; for a summary of the specific topics covered see www.livones.net/lili/en/projekti/). These will also focus on the potential role of Livonian in the national economy, especially in tourism, to improve the local prominence of the language. Similarly, the status and sociocultural aspects of Latgalian have been studied in a number of locally based research projects. A particular focus was on the linguistic landscape of Latgalian and its use in sociolinguistically meaningful domains (science, education, culture, mass media, public announcements etc; (Lazdiņa & Marten, 2019; Lazdiņa, Pošeiko & Marten, 2013). Attention has also been paid to socio-economic implications and meta-awareness of multilingual repertoires, and aspects of trans-locality in language use on the Estonian-Latvian border area. Bibliographic details of publications, projects and conferences of Livonian and Latgalian studies are in Kļava’s compilation (2018) on Latvian studies.
Lithuania Lithuania’s sociolinguistic research has been focused at the macro-level on language ideology, policy and education, with studies at the micro-level looking into individual language preferences, language use and attitudes. As in the neighbouring republics, Lithuanian language policy still functions largely using a protectionist and purist approach in the regulation of a range of language issues, including the growing prominence of English in the linguistic landscape. In recent public language ideological debates, a defensive stance on language use has been criticised, with sociolinguists, intellectuals and popular opinion leaders advocating a more liberal language policy approach (Vaicekauskienė & Šepetys, 2016). Nevertheless, the cultural importance of perceived 645
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bonds between the titular language and national identity has been shown to matter, across all generations (Vaicekauskienė, 2010). Recent sociolinguistic research on language attitudes and use in Lithuania’s urban areas has demonstrated considerable regional and generational differences in the ways people learn, use, value and identify with languages. Diverse orientations have also been observed in the linguistic landscape of smaller towns and cities across the country (Ramonienė, 2010, 2013). Moreover, attitudes toward local dialects and identity have been shown to be region-specific, with stronger bonds registered in the northwestern Žemaičių (Samogitian) area and weaker ties in (southern) Dzūkija (Ramonienė, 2013). In general, dialects as well as English appear to be valued more these days, revealing opposing glocalising trends (Vilkienė, 2022). There has also been some interdisciplinary research on dialect revival, using a geolinguistic approach (Aliūkaitė et al., 2017; Mikulėnienė et al., 2014). Another research direction (reflected more in Lithuania than in Estonia and Latvia) is linked to processes of emigration. Since joining the EU, a large number of Lithuanians have left for the West. This trend stimulated an interest in studying aspects of language and identity, Lithuanian as a heritage language and family language policy (intergenerational transmission, language maintenance, shift and attrition). Recent investigations on language attitudes, mainly by upcoming researchers in the field, have revealed the specificity of linguistic behaviour found in diverse Lithuanian diaspora settings (from the US to Canada, Argentina, Great Britain, Norway and Sweden), reflecting on speakers’ linguistic repertoires and communicative experience, their efforts to maintain Lithuanian and the risks they face of losing it (Gudavičienė, 2019; Jakaitė-Bulbukienė, 2015; Hilbig, 2020; Vaisėtaitė, 2021; Bisinger, 2021). Research on child and youth language, especially in the bilingual and multilingual context, is in progress. Analyses have been carried out on cognitive aspects of child language acquisition in language contact situations, in the context of Lithuanian-English in the UK (Blažienė, 2016), as well as of Russian-Lithuanian (Dabašinskienė & Krivickaitė-Leišienė, 2019) and of Polish-Lithuanian in Lithuania (Vilkienė et al., 2019). Findings demonstrate statistically significant differences in bilingual and monolingual children’s competence in Lithuanian, suggesting the need for revision of current educational methods for bilinguals. In addition, observations show that in the predominantly Lithuanian language environment of Kaunas, young children of minority background tend to acquire multilingual repertoires more easily than in the linguistically more diverse capital Vilnius (Čubajevaitė, 2013; Dabašinskienė & Krivickaitė-Leišienė, 2019), including better competence in Lithuanian at an earlier age. In complementing more broad-based data on children’s primary and additional language competencies (as obtained from PISA or other, national test results), such small-scale findings can inform more differentiated, community-oriented approaches to language education. Language policy and integration issues in Lithuania’s sizeable Russian and Polish language communities have been discussed in various publications and remain relevant in education (Lichačiova, 2013; Šliavaitė, 2019; Frėjutė-Rakauskienė et al., 2016; Dabašinskienė, 2021). Observations in various Lithuanian localities attest to positive attitudes towards Lithuanian and Lithuania of many first-language speakers of Russian. Research in Visaginas, a town with a Russian majority in the north-east, near the now decommissioned power plant Ignalina, has pointed out insufficient levels of support there for learning and using Lithuanian (Baločkaitė, 2010; Mažeikienė & Gerulaitienė, 2018), leading to language deficiencies in the upcoming generation (Dabašinskienė, 2021; Labanauskas, 2014; Šliavaitė, 2012). Studies of south-eastern Lithuania on Polish-speakers demonstrate similar results (Geben & Ramonienė, 2015; Frėjutė-Rakauskienė et al., 2016). 646
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Research emphases and future directions across the Baltic The use of the titular languages (Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian) has expanded into all social domains, in education, employment, entertainment, the arts. However, each republic’s diverging sociolinguistic parameters make demands on different research directions. Language practices are still debated intensively at the national level, with special focus on language policies and ideologies. Yet questions such as nation-building based on a common language and culture are critiqued in the literature (cf. Lazdiņa & Marten, 2019; Giordano, 2019). On the one hand, Baltic governments have introduced inclusive policies reflecting the language and education needs of minority groups. However, on the other hand, from the perspective of linguistic rights (Phillipson, 2011; Muižnieks, 2010; Šliavaitė, 2019) there has been criticism surrounding the lack of pluralism, a truly multilingual approach in education, and social harmony in the society. In particular, it has been claimed that governmental policies ultimately favour monolingualism – the so-called monolingual turn (Pavlenko, 2013). Still, since EU accession, there has been a greater focus on inclusion, especially in education, economy and social studies research. Overall, the last decade has been marked by a search for balance and compromise (Druviete, 2018). This has led to a more tolerant and open dialogue between majority and minority groups, and the language “issue” does not seem to be as crucial as it was two decades ago. Recent studies and surveys (cf. Lauze & Kļava, 2016; Ramonienė, 2010, 2013; Šliavaitė, 2019; Zabrodskaja, 2015; IMES, 2017; SISCE, 2020) demonstrate that favourable attitudes to language diversity are on the increase, for example in the use both of dialects (in Lithuania) and indigenous minority languages (in Latvia and Estonia). Overall, the bulk of research has moved from examining macro-sociolinguistic issues of language rights, policy and problems to individual language behaviour at the micro level. Variously, throughout the Baltic states, the focus is now more on contact-induced changes and on how individuals use languages in the multilingual context. Speakers’ language choice decisions have been explored in diverse settings of everyday life (particularly in regions with exogenous languages), in schools (language of instruction, languages learnt), in the family (family language policy, intergenerational transmission), both at home and abroad (maintenance and attrition of heritage languages). In general, recent Baltic sociolinguistics research has focused on an expanding number of domains, utilising a diversity of methodologies, to reveal changes, shifts and continuities in language practices, often but not solely, from the framework of the nation state. As we have seen, the scholarship is diversifying, with comparative perspectives offered in some cross-Baltic collections. This research also notes tendencies to overcome the “language as a problem” obstacle and to perceive multilingualism as a resource (cf. Hogan-Brun, 2017). Although the number of publications has increased, there is space for further sociolinguistic research on language discourses and language policy, as well as inclusive approaches to multilingualism, linking with broader debates on language and nationalism at a time of both increased globalisation and ethno-regionalism.
Acknowledgements We thank Solvita Pošeiko-Berra, Anna Verschik and Karl Pajusalu for supplying information on recent sociolinguistics research in Latvia and Estonia respectively.
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650
LANGUAGE INDEX
Aboriginal languages (see Indigenous languages) African American Language (see English - African American Vernacular English) Afrikaans 124–125, 401–402, 404, 413–418 Albanian — Albania 522, 598–602, 605–608 — Caucasian Albanian: 292 Alsatian 502, 513 Amazigh (see Berber) Amharic 279, 281–283, 383, 387 Andamanese 184, 193–194 Arabic 148, 269–273, 278–279, 281–282, 307, 361–363, 383–384, — Arabic vernaculars 361, 364–366 — Juba Arabic 383 — Standard Arabic 362 Armenian 249, 252, 279–282, 290–296 Assamese 159, 161–162, 185, 193
Chinese: 134, 136–141, 187, 201–202, 206–208, 210–212, 217–219, 228–235, 238–243, 279, 281, 307, 323, 339, 406, 459, 468, 554 — Putonghua (Mandarin): 134–135, 138–139, 243 Chinook: 40, 42–43 Circassian: 282, 289, 291–292 Cornish: 468, 494–495 Creole 54, 68–70, 108–112 — Afro Seminole Creole 54 — Belizean Creole 67–70, 109 — Caribbean Creoles 110–112 — French Guyanese Creole 109 — Limonese Creole 68 — Mauritian Creole 423–429 — Nicaragua Creole English 68 — Réunion Island Creole 423–425 Croatian 523, 530, 577, 585, 599–600, 605 Czech 582–585
Basotho 405 Basque 513, 551, 553–555 Bengali 147, 155–162, 176 Berber 361, 363–364 Bishnupriya 147, 156, 159, 162 Bosnian 599–600, 605–606, 609 Brahui 154, 170–171, 177–178 Breton 493–494, 496 Bulgarian 279, 598–599, 601, 605–608 Burmese 189–190, 193, 227–229, 231
Danish 454–456 Dari 259–262, 265–267 Dhivehi 147–148 Dravidian languages 154, 158, 170–175, 177–179 Dutch 75, 108–111, 114, 124–125, 212, 239, 279, 348, 445–450 Dzongkha 151–152, 184–187, 190 English 13–20, 28–29, 111–112, 127–129, 135–136, 148, 150–151, 154–155, 157, 162–163, 200–201, 206, 217, 229, 241–242, 284–285, 317–318, 323, 339–341, 362, 383–386, 401, 412, 426, 461–462, 467–468, 478 — Aboriginal Englishes 318 — African American (Vernacular) English 14–16, 20–21
Cantonese 125, 228, 240, 243, Catalan 551, 555 Caucasian languages (North-West) 289–290 Chechen 290, 292 Chichewa 401–402
651
Language index — American English(es) 13–14, 20–22, 30 — NY City English 23 — Atlantic Englishes 120–127 — Bermudian English 121–123 — Tristan da Cunha English 124–125 — St Helena English 125–126 — Australian English 303–306 — Black Namibian English(es) 402 — British English (and varieties) 470–474 — Canadian English 29–31 — Québec English 31 — Caribbean English 112–115 — Hawai’i English 21 — Hispanic English 16 — Irish English 482–485 — Latinx English 16 — Maltese English 570–571 — ‘New Englishes’ 242–243 — New Zealand English 324–328 — Singapore English 241 — Standard Belizean English 112 — South African English 413–414 Estonian: 643–644, 647
Icelandic 458, 502 Indigenous languages — Aboriginal languages 306, 312–320 — Africa 375–378 — North America 39–50 — Mexico 55–58 — Nahuatl 55, 57–62, 102–103 — Yucatec Maya 61 — South America 74–79 — Amazonian languages 75–76 — Aymara 75–76, 95–96, 102–104 — Guaraní 75–77, 95, 102–103 — Mapuche 102 — Mayan languages 55–56, 65–68, 97, 109 — Quechua 74–79, 95–96, 102–104 — Pacific Islands 333–341 Indonesian 210, 239–244, 348, 350, 352–353 Irish 478- 481, 489–490 Italian 279, 306, 361–362, 501, 518–523, 533–534 — Italo-Romance dialects 519–521
Farsi (see Persian) Fijian: 337–339 Filipino (see Tagalog) Finnish 456–458, 460–462 Francoprovençal 411, 504, 512, 532 French: 28–34, 75, 108–114, 198, 201, 212, 233– 234, 260, 266, 278–283, 335, 337–339, 361–364, 366, 375, 382–383, 391–392, 400–405, 424–429, 488, 494, 496–497, 501–511, 532–533 — Canadian French 31–34 — Local vernaculars 513–514 — Parisian French 411 — World Frenches 424–425 Frisian 446–447
Kannada 151, 171–172, 174–176 Kazakh 197–198 Khasi 184–185, 190–193, Khmer 229–235, 233–234 Khoe languages 416 Kirundi 372 Kiswahili (see Swahili) Kokni (see Konkani) Konkani 151, 158, 417 Korean 198, 201–202, 210, 217–223 Kurux 171–172, 176–177
Japanese 201–203, 206–214, 217, 221, 336 Javanese 221, 238–239, 242–244
Lao 229–235 Latgalian 643, 645 Latvian 644–645, 647 Lithuanian 645–646, 647 Livonian 645 Luganda 385 Luxembourgish 542–546
Galician 551, 553, 555, 561 Georgian 289–295 German 75, 198, 201–202, 212, 252, 260, 278–279, 400–401, 435–438, 530–531, 542–544 Greek 249, 253, 259, 264, 278–279, 290–291, 588, 598–599, 601–602, 608 Gujarati 151, 417, 426, 564
Macedonian 598–599, 601–602, 606–608 Mahl/Mahal 147–148 Malagasy 401–406, 424–426, 429 Malay 239–240 Malayalam 161–163, 171 Maltese 569–573 Manx 468, 491–492 Maori 323–324, 326–329, 337–338, 340 Marathi 151, 161, 174 Meitei 159, 184–185, 189 Molmo 348–349, 356
Hakka 228, 243, 426 Hebrew 278–285 Heritage languages 34, 282–283 Hindi 147–148, 151–152, 157–158, 160–162, 175, 185–187, 193, 261 Hmong 227, 229, 231–233, 235 Hungarian 278–279, 502, 576–580, 606–607
652
Language index Mongolian: 197–204 — Mongolian Uyghur 197–199, 249, 253 Montenegrin 599–600, 605–606, 609 Munda (Munda languages) 156, 158, 174, 177, 184, 190–193 Myanmar (see Burmese)
— Maltese Sign Language 569, 571–572 — New Zealand Sign Language 324, 328 — South African Sign Languages 414–415 Siswati 401–402, 413 Siama 348–349, 356 Sinhalese (Sinhala) 147, 149–151, 178–179, 185 Sindhi 154–156, 178 Slovak 576–583 Slovene 605–607 Soninké 361, 363 Spanish 17, 54–55, 65, 75, 95, 550–556 — Andalusian Spanish 99, 551 — Caribbean Spanish 99 — Central American Spanish 68–7 — Latin American Spanish 95–98, 100–104 — Andean Spanish 76, 95 — Mexican Spanish varieties 55, 62, 95 — Puerto Rican Spanish 17, 95 — Valencian Spanish 551 — South American Spanish (see Latin American Spanish) Swahili 375, 383–387, 429 Swedish 456–458
Nagamese 158–162 Nakh-Daghestanian languages 290 Ndebele 401–402 Nepali 147, 151–153, 184–188, 193 Nicobarese 184, 190–193 Norwegian 458–460 Nubian 361 Nuu-wee-ya’ 44 Occitan 489, 512, 522–523 Papuan languages 333–335 Picard 512–513 Pidgin — Kriol (Australian) 317–318 — Pidgin Arabic 271 — Pidgincreole (see Juba Arabic) — Hawai’I Pidgin 21 — New South Wales Pidgin 317–318 Persian 249–250, 259–267, 279 Polish 468, 478–479, 585–588, 643 Portuguese 75, 211, 391, 395, 560–564 — African Portuguese 393–394, — Brazilian Portuguese 85–93, 561, — Portuguese creoles 392–393 Pulaar 361, 363 Punjabi 34, 147, 154–155, 468
Tagalog 210, 238–239, 279 Tamazight (see Berber) Thai (Tai) 184, 229–231, Tajik 259–267, Tamil 149–151, 171, 174–176, 178–179, 241, 426 Tarok 375 Telugu 171–172, 174–176, 426 Tibeto-Burman languages 154, 187–190, 231, Tigrinya 383–384, 387 Tok Pisin 334, 348–355 Turkish 201–202, 248–254, 278–279, 295, 437– 438, 449, 502, 598, 601, 607–608 — Turkish languages 248, 250- 254, 290–291
Romani (languages) 54, 459–460, 468, 552, 578, 585 Romanian 606 Romansh 534–535 Russian 199, 201, 283–284, 289, 292–295, 613–623, 631–639, 644, 646,
Ukrainian 631–639 Urdu 147, 154–155, 174, 178, 185, 187, 193, 261, 468 Vietnamese 210, 229, 233–236, 306, 585
Sami (and Sami varieties) 456–457, 459–460 Saraiki 154–155 Scottish Gaelic 467–469, 490–491, 496 Serbian 261, 530, 577–578, 580, 598–601, 605–609 Serbo-Croatian 599–600, 605 Sesotho 401–403, 405, 413, 415 Setswana 401–402, 413 Shona 401–402 Sign Languages — Plains Indian Sign Language 40 — British Sign Language 468, 474 — Irish Sign Language 478
Welsh 467, 469–470, 492–493 Wolof 361, 363, 375 Xhosa 413, 415–418 Yanké 375 Yiddish 278–285, 460, 605 Yoruba 372, 377 Zulu 413, 415–418
653
SUBJECT INDEX
accent — Australia 306–307 — Bermuda 122 — Britain 475 — East Midlands 471 — Irish English 483, 485 — Manchester 470 — Mongolian 202 — Pakistan 156 — Russia 619 — Scottish/English border 474 — Spain 553 — Thai 231 — Trinidad 111 — Welsh 469–470 accommodation 15–16, 273, 325, 364, 483, 531, 634, 636 acoustic phonetics 13, 16–17, 23, 97, 122, 308, 325–326, 411–412, 468, 570 Afghanistan see chapters 15 and 21 Africa see Part IV age — 1, 14, 43, 57, 87, 90, 97, 125, 153–154, 158, 161, 172, 178, 281, 315, 324, 327–328, 353, 387, 402, 412, 414, 439, 470, 473, 475, 483, 493, 495–497, 504, 507, 510, 513–514, 570, 584, 614, 616, 617–620, 623, 634–637 — Australian English 303–305, 308 — United States 17, 21 — see also children; young people Albania see chapter 51 alphabets — Arabic 4, 148, 198, 250; 253, 261, 292, 366 — Cyrillic 3, 197–199, 201, 253, 261–262, 293, 631
— Hangeul 222 — Roman/Latin alphabet 7, 192, 212, 293, 295, 366 — Romanization/Latinization 141, 185, 188–189, 192–193, 218, 222, 229, 231–233, 235, 267, 293, 295, 366 — Turkish language reform (TLR) 4, 249–250 — Uyghur 197, 199 — see also orthography; written language anthropological linguistics — Mexico 54 — Southern Africa 404–405 — see also ethnicity Arabic 4, 5, 7, 34, 148, 155–156, 187, 198, 249–250, 252–253, 261–262, 278–283, 285, 306–307, 377, 425, 429, 437–438, 501, 554; see chapter 22 — Arabs and Jews in Israel see chapter 23 — the Caucasus 292 — Classical Arabic (fushaa) 269, 281, 362–363, 429 — dialect see chapter 22, 281, 364–365 — diglossia 281–282 — East Africa see chapter 32 — Egyptian Arabic 364, see also chapter 30 — English 156, 384 — Israel see chapter 23 — Middle East see chapter 22 — Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) 280–281 — North Africa see chapter 30 — religion 148, 249–250, 293, 429 — script see alphabets: Arabic — Turks 249–250 — vernaculars 5, 361–362, 364 — see also chapter 51
654
Subject index areal linguistics 43, 416, 581 Armenia see chapter 24 atlases — the Caribbean 115 — the Caucasus 191 — Celtic languages 495 — Central and South America 102 — Dutch language area 448 — East Central Europe 576, 578 — German 435–436 — India 173 — Indian Ocean Languages 427 — Italy 518, 520 — Luxembourg 545 — Portuguese 560 — Scots 469 — Switzerland 531 — United States 13 Australia see chapter 25 Azerbaijan see chapter 24 the Balkans see chapter 51 Baltic States see chapter 54 Bantu languages 392, 394, 401, 411 — see also chapters 31–36 Belarus 586 Belgium see chapter 38 bilingualism 2, 4 — Australia 318 — British Isles 467, 469–470, 480, 492 — Canada 28–29 — the Caribbean 112–113 — Hungary 578, 580 — Indian Ocean languages 424, 427, 429 — Israel 280–281, 284 — Korea 218 — Malta 571 — Mexico 54, 56–57 — New Guinea 351 — New Zealand 324 — Nordic region 455–457, 460 — the Pacific 339 — Poland 586 — Portugal 564 — South America: bilingualism, migration and identity 75, 101–102, 104 — South Africa 416 — South Asia 146, 149–150, 152, 157, 170, 173–174, 177, 236 — South Pacific 171–72, 173 — St Helena 126 — West and Central Africa 372 — Switzerland 530–531 — Ukraine 632–637, 639 — see also language contact, language shift, monolingualism
borrowing — Afghanistan 177–178 — Bangladesh 156 — Balochi 177–178 — Brahui 177–178 — the Caucasus 291–292 — Celtic languages 496 — Dravidian Languages in South Asia 175 — East Africa 387 — Falklands 129 — French language area 501–503 — German language area 438 — Hispanic South America 103 — Hungarian 578 — indigenous languages of Australia 316 — indigenous languages of North America 48 — indigenous languages of South America 76 — Iranian world 259, 262 — Italy 523 — Japan 212 — Khmer 234 — Mexico 57 — Modern Israeli Hebrew 281–282 — Mundari 191 — North Africa 364 — Pacific 335–336, 338–339 — Pakistan 177–178 — Palestinian Arabic 282 — Pali 234 — Russian 620 — Sanskrit 191, 234 — Sinhala 151, 179 — South Africa 415–416 — United States 18 — see also code-switching; lexicon Bosnia-Herzegovina 604–609 British Isles see chapter 40 Bulgaria see chapter 51 Burma see chapter 18; 187, 189–190, 193 Cambodia see chapter 18 Canada see chapter 2 the Caribbean see chapter 9 the Caucasus see chapter 24 children — Arabic in the Middle East 273 — Australasia 312, 314–316, 318–320 — Breton 497 — Britain 473 — Burma 229 — Canada 31 — the Caribbean 110, 113 — the Caucasus 293 — Central America 67 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 177 — Dutch language area 448–449
655
Subject index — Eritrea 384 — Estonia 644 — Falkland Island English 128 — French language area 506, 511, 513 — Hungary 580–581 — Indian Ocean languages 423, 429 — indigenous languages of North America 42, 47–48 — indigenous languages of South America 77 — Indo-European languages in South Asia 161 — Irish 489 — Israeli sociolinguistics 280–284 — Japan 210–211, 213 — Korea 221 — Lithuania 646 — Lusophone Africa 394–395 — Malta 571–572 — Mexico 59–62 — New Guinea 350–351, 353 — New Zealand 323–324 — Nordic region 455, 457–459, 461 — the Pacific 335–339 — Russian 619–620 — Scottish Gaelic 491 — Singapore 241–242 — South Africa 412, 415–416 — Southern Africa 404 — Sudan 366 — Switzerland 535 — Ukraine 636 — United States 14–15, 17, 20 — West and Central Africa 375 — see also age; language acquisition China see chapter 11 citizenship 176, 209, 251, 337, 523, 543, 642; — linguistic 394, 416 class — Australian English 303–304, 306 — Brazil 87, 89 — British English 301 — Canada 29, 32 — the Caribbean 111 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 175 — East Africa 386–387 — England 470–471, 473 — French language area 509–510 — German 439 — Hispanic South America 97–99 — indigenous languages of Australia 319 — indigenous languages of South America 78–79 — Indo-European languages in South Asia 158, 163 — Ireland 480, 484 — Japan 208 — New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) 328 — Persian, Tajik and Dari 260
— Russia 618, 620–621 — Scotland 468 — South Africa 411–412, 416 — Sweden 460 — United States 1, 14–15, 17 — see also politics code-mixing 7 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 179 — Irish 490 — Italy 522 — Turkish and Turkic languages 252 — see also borrowing; code-switching; language shift code-switching 2 — Arabic in the Middle East 272–273 — the Caribbean 112–113 — Celtic languages 498 — Central America 68–69 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 170, 179 — Dutch language area 449 — East Central Europe 582 — Estonia 644 — German (Swiss) 530–531 — Hungarian 578 — indigenous languages of Australia 312, 316–318 — Irish 490 — Luxembourg 543 — Malta 570–571 — New Guinea 350 — the Pacific 335 — South Africa 413, 415 — Southern Africa 403 — Switzerland 535 — Turkic languages 252–253 — United States 18 — see also borrowing; code-mixing; language shift colony, colonisation, colonialism 47 — Andamans 193 — Canada 28, 30, 32 — decolonisation 47–48, 340, 342, 384, 388, 405, 413 — East Africa 382–383 — Indian Ocean Languages 424, 427–429 — Iranian languages 260 — Lusophone Africa 391–393 — Madagascar 401 — Maritime Southeast Asia 238–240 — Mexico 57 — New Guinea 351 — the Pacific 333–338, 342 — postcolonial 58, 121, 123, 147, 149, 150, 238–239, 242–243, 315, 333, 394, 634 — settler-colonialism, settler-colonisation 31, 41, 47, 121, 123, 335, 338
656
Subject index — South Africa 404, 417 — Southeast Asia 227 — Southern Africa 401–402, 405 — Sri Lanka 150 — West Central Africa 372–373, 375–377 communities of practice 15, 17, 88, 100, 104, 251, 315, 588 creole 2, 5 — acrolect, basilect, mesolect 304, 317–318, 350, 427 — Atlantic Englishes 121, 123–124 — Australia 317, 319 — Bislama 334–335, 340 — the Caribbean 108–115 — Central America 65–70 — East Africa 383 — Hispanic South America 102 — Indian Ocean languages 423–427 — Island Melanesia 334–335 — Japan 211 — Lusophone Africa 391–394 — Maritime Southeast Asia 238, 244 — Mexico 54, 65 — Oaxaca Spanish 55 — New Guinea: pidgin/Creole 5, 348, 350 (Hiri Motu 5, 348, 351–352; Tok Pisin 5, 334, 348–352, 354–355) — the Pacific 336 — Portugal 564 — West and Central Africa 375–377 — see also the Caribbean; language contact; pidgin Croatia see chapter 51 Czech Republic (Czechia) see chapter 50
democracy 200–201, 203, 219, 384, 394, 405, 417, 550 Denmark see chapter 39 diachronic issues 97, 99–100, 136, 270, 413, 471 — diachronic/synchronic relation 104, 140, 161, 308 dialect 1, 3, 4, 6 — Arabic 270–271, 273, 278, 281–282, 364–365 — the Baltic states 643, 646–647 — Bangladesh 156–157 — the Balkans 598–599, 601–602, 605 — Bermudian English 122, 123 — British Isles 468–475 — Canada 29–34 — the Caribbean 112, 123 — the Caucasus 290–291 — Celtic languages 495–496 — Central America 67–70 — China 135 — Denmark 455 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 170–172, 177–178 — Dutch language area 448 — Falklands 127–129 — French language area 502, 504 — German language area 435–438 — Hispanic South America 102 — Hungary 577–578 — Indian Ocean languages 429 — indigenous languages of Australia 314, 316, 318–319 — intra-dialectal variation 270 — Italy 519–522 — indigenous languages of North America 42, 44 — Indo-European languages in South Asia 147–148, 159–161 — Iranian languages 261 — Ireland 480–482 — Israel 282 — Japan 206, 208–209, 211, 213–214 — Korea 217–218, 220, 222 — levelling 350, 437, 468, 472–473 — Luxembourg 542, 544–545 — Malagasy 401, 404 — Malay 239 — Malta 569–572 — Mandarin 134 — Maritime Southeast Asia 242–243 — Mexico 58–59 — New Guinea 349–351 — New Zealand 325 — Nordic region 462 — North Africa 364 — Norway 458–460 — Occitan 512
Daghestan, Dagestan see chapter 24 Deaf Community 341, 468, 474 — 1-handshape 20 — the Caribbean 113 — American Sign Language (ASL) 15, 20, 23, 34, 113, 341 — internet 21 — Israeli Sign Language (ISL) 283 — Maltese Sign Language (LSM) 571 — New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) 324, 328, 341 — South African Sign Language (SASL) 411, 413–415, 417–418 — United States 40 deletion — Bermudian English 122 — French 507, 509–510, 513 — Hispanic South America 97–98 — India 158 — South England 472 — Spanish (Central America) 70 — United States 20
657
Subject index — the Pacific 336, 341 — Pakistan 154–155 — Portugal 561–562 — Russia 613–614, 616–619 — Scottish Gaelic 491 — Singapore 240 — South Africa 411, 414, 417 — South Asia 187–193 — South Pacific — Spain 551 — Sri Lanka 178 — St Helena 125 — Switzerland 530–534 — Tristan da Cunha 124 — Turkey 249, 252–254 — United States 13–16, 19, 22 — Vietnamese 235 — West and Central Africa 374, 378 — see also dialect/language distinction; dialectology; diglossia; language variation; politics; region dialectology — Arabic 269, 281, 364 — Britain 474 — the Caucasus 296 — Celtic languages 495 — China 133 — Dutch language area 446 — the Falklands 127 — German 435–436 — Hungarian 577 — indigenous languages of North America 39 — Italy 518, 523 — Korea 218 — Nordic region 455, 457, 459–460, 462 — Polish 588 — Portugal 563 — Russia 614 — Slovakia 580 — South Africa 411 — Switzerland 531 — United States 13, 21 — see also dialect; language variation; phonology, phonetics; region diglossia — Arabic 281–282 — Australia 316 — Breton 494 — Burmese 227 — the Caribbean 112 — Central America 65, 67–68 — Gaelic languages 496 — German (Swiss) 530–531 — Greek 601–602 — Indian Ocean languages 425, 427–429 — Iranian world 259, 264, 266
— Lusophone Africa 392 — Malta 569, 571 — Mexico 57 — New Guinea 349 — the Pacific 338 — Romansh 534 — South Asia 157, 170, 174–175 — Sri Lanka 149 — Ukraine 636 — see also language shift Dutch, Dutch language area see chapter 38 East Africa see chapter 32 education, schooling 3–5 — Arabic 273 — Australia 304 — the Balkans 603–604, 606, 609 — the Baltic states 642–647 — Bangladesh 156 — Basque 513 — Bengali 160 — Brazil 87–89, 91 — British Isles 468–469, 491 — Burma 229 — Cambodia 234 — Canada 29, 33 — the Caribbean 108, 111–112, 114 — the Caucasus 293, 295 — Celtic languages 488–491, 493, 496–498 — Central America 67–68 — China 134, 138–139 — Denmark 455–456 — Dutch language area 447–450 — East Africa 382–386, 38 — East Central Europe 577, 579–580, 582, 584 — Falklands 127–128 — Finland 457 — French language area 501–502, 506, 511–512 — German language area 437 — Hispanic South America 96, 102–104 — Iceland 458 — indigenous languages of North America 46, 49 — India 157–158, 162, 172, 175–176 — Indian Ocean languages 424–426, 429 — indigenous languages of North America 45, 47 — indigenous languages of South America 74–75, 77–79 — Iranian languages 261 — Ireland 479–480 — Israel 279–281, 283–284 — Italy 521, 523 — Japan 206, 208, 210, 213 — Korea 218–219, 221–222
658
Subject index — Laos 233 — literacy 49, 79, 162, 172, 176, 230, 233, 242, 249, 250, 278, 280–281, 283, 291, 292, 293, 339–340, 352, 363, 384, 388, 395, 402–403, 457, 535, 542, 546, 642–643 — Lusophone Africa 391–395 — Luxembourg 543, 545 — Malta 570, 572 — Maritime Southeast Asia 238–244 — Mexico 59–60, 460 — Mongolia 197–200, 203 — Nagaland 159 — Nepal 153 — New Guinea 351, 353–354 — New Zealand 323 — Nordic region 460, 462 — North Africa 361–363 — Norway 459 — Occitan 512 — the Pacific 333, 335, 338–341 — Pakistan 154–155 — Portugal 564 — Russia 614, 616–619 — South Asia 185–186 — South Africa 415, 417–418 — Southern Africa 401–404 — Spain 555 — Sri Lanka 149–151, 178 — Sweden 460–461 — Switzerland 530–535 — Thailand 230–231 — Timor-Leste 242 — Turkic languages 248–251 — Ukraine 633, 635–636 — United States 15 — Vietnam 236 — West and Central Africa 373, 376 — see also language policy and planning Egypt see chapter 30 England, English see chapter 40 enregisterment 86–87, 90, 245, 484–485 Eritrea see chapter 32 Estonia see chapter 54 Ethiopia see chapter 32 ethnicity 207 — Australia 307–308: LOTEs and ethnic varieties 306–308 — Bhutan 152 — Canada 31–32 — Celtic languages 488 — Central America 67 — China 134 — East Africa 383 — German 437–438 — ethnolects, multiethnolects 31–32, 303 438, 449, 470, 473, 475, 531
— ethnolinguistic groups 238, 384, 553, 602, 634 — ethnolinguistic vitality 387 — Mexico 10 — North Africa 363 — Nepal 152 — New Zealand 324, 327–328 — Nordic region 461 — the Pacific 341 — Polynesia 337 — South Africa 412–414 — South America 78 — South Asia 186 — Sri Lanka 150 — Ukraine 639 — United States 16, 22, (African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) 15–16, 22) — West and Central Africa 374 — see also anthropological linguistics; the Balkans; East Africa; ethnographic approaches; identity; indigenous languages; minority languages; South Africa; West and Central Africa ethnographic approaches 77–80, 85–88, 90, 93, 97, 102–103, 111, 124–125, 221, 252, 315–316, 364, 373, 385, 392, 416, 449, 457–458, 461, 550, 553, 643 — ethnography of speaking 219, 296 femininity 17–18, 90, 91, 211, 504 — see also gender; women Finland see chapter 39 France, French see chapter 43 gender 1, 3 — Arabic 271, 273 — Australia 315, 319 — Australian English 303–304, 308 — Brazil 89–90, 92 — Britain 475 — Canada 26, 31–32 — the Caribbean 110–111 — the Caucasus 291 — Celtic languages 495–496 (grammatical gender 497) — Dravidian languages (grammatical gender) 171 — East Central Europe 582–584, 587 — the Falklands 128 — French 504–507, 510 — German 437–440 — Hindi grammatical gender 161 — Hispanic South America 102 — homosexuality 16, 92, 553 — India 158, 172 — indigenous languages of North America 43 — Iranian languages 260 — Ireland 482–483
659
Subject index — Japan 211–212 — Korea 218, 222 — Luxembourg 514 — Malta 570 — Mexico 57 — Modern Hebrew 281 — Nepal 153 — New Guinea 350 — New Zealand 328 — Nordic region 459–460 — perception studies 22–23, 89 — North Africa 363, 365 — North England 471 — Portugal 563 — Russia, 618–619, 622 — Scotland 468 — sexual orientation 16–17, 90 — sexuality 461 — South Africa 412, 414 — Southern Africa 400, 404 — South Asia 163 — South England 473 — Spain 553 — Switzerland 533 — Tristan da Cunha 124 — Turkic languages 251, 254 — Ukraine 634–636 — United States 14, 16–17, 20–21 — Wales 469 — see also women Georgia see chapter 24 German, German language area see chapter 37 globalization — Arabic in Israel 282 — China 133, 136, 140 — Dutch language area 449 — East Central Europe 582–583 — Korea 221 — Israel 284 — Lusophone Africa 395 — Maritime Southeast Asia 244–245 — Mongolia 200 — Nordic region 462 — South Africa 418 graffiti 366, 554, 620 grammar — Amazigh 363 — Australia 156 — Britain 473 — Burmese 229 — the Caucasus 290 — French 507 — generative 153, 519 — German 438 — Indian Ocean languages 424 — indigenous languages of Australia 318
— indigenous languages of South America 76 — Indo-European languages in South Asia 156, 160–162 — Iranian world 261 — Ireland 485 — Kiezdeutsch 438 — Khmer 234 — Korea 222 — Lao 232 — Lomavren (Bosha) 290 — Lusophone Africa 391 — Luxembourgish 544 — mental grammar and language acquisition 20 — Portugal 560, 562 — Russia 614 — South Africa 415 — Tajik 261 — Tamil 175 — Thai 230 — Tok Pisin 351 — Tsotsitaal 415 — Turkish 250 — Ukraine 634 — United States 18, 20 — West and Central Africa 372 — see also morphology and syntax Greece see chapter 51 historical sociolinguistics 49 — Celtic languages 495 — Dutch language area 447, 450 — Mexican indigenous languages 56–58 — Nordic region 454, 460 — Slovak 582 Hungary, Czech Republic (Czechia) and Poland see chapter 50 identity 3, 7 — Arabic 271–273 — Australia 306–308, 315, 317–318 — the Balkans 598–601, 607–608 — the Baltic states 642–646 — Bulgarian 608 — British Isles 470–471, 473–474 — Canada 30, 32–33 — the Caribbean 108, 110, 113, 115 — the Caucasus 290–292, 294, 296 — Celtic languages 491–494, 496 — Central America 66–70 — China 134, 136, 139 — cultural 155, 198, 241, 264, 280, 426, 504, 564, 598 — Dutch language area 449 — East Africa 384, 386–387 — ethnic 23, 67, 150–152, 194, 281–282, 292, 307–308, 324, 586, 632
660
Subject index — ethnolinguistic 351, 491 — Finland 457 — French 496, 504, 514 — gender 260 — German 436 — Hispanic South America 96, 98, 100, 103–104 — Iceland 458 — India 172–174 — Indian Ocean languages 424, 426 — indigenous languages of North America 44, 47 — indigenous languages of South America 77–78, 80 — Indo-European languages of South Asia 151–152, 154–157, 159 — Iranian world 264, 266 — Ireland 479, 482–483, 486, 490 — Israel 278, 280–285 — Italy 518, 520–523 — Japanese 209, 211–212 — Jewish 278 — Korea 221 — local 33, 68, 240, 350, 471, 473 — Lusophone Africa 393 — Luxembourg 543 — Macedonian 601 — Malta 570–571 — Maritime Southeast Asia 239–241, 244 — Mexico 62 — Mongolia 198 — national 28, 151, 230, 238, 264, 278, 282, 306, 384, 387, 426, 458, 543, 545, 564, 582, 598–599, 601, 632, 635 — Nepal 177 — New Guinea 348–351, 353–355 — New Zealand 324 — North Africa 362–364 — Norway 459 — the Pacific 334, 336, 338 — Pakistan 155 — Polish 586, 588 — politics 155, 416 — Portugal 560, 562, 564 — regional 493, 619 — religious 290–291, 607 — Russia 619 — sexual 553 — Slovak 582 — South Asia 186, 194 — South Africa 413, 416 — Southern Africa 404 — Spain 550, 553 — Sweden 461–462 — Switzerland 533 — Turkic languages 251–254
— Ukraine 632, 635–639 — United States 14–16, 19, 22, 23 — Welsh 493 — see also ethnicity indexical, indexicality, indexicalities, indexicalisation 22, 75, 77–78, 80, 86, 88–89, 91, 93, 111, 271, 312, 314, 315, 320, 365, 439, 470, 472, 485 indigenous languages see chapters 3, 6, 26 Indo-European 54, 177, 184, 262, 289–290, 488, 631 — also see chapter 12 Indonesia see chapter 19 interactional sociolinguistics 17–18, 76, 79, 91, 110, 111, 219, 308, 319, 458, 531, 553, 563 internet — Amazigh 363 — the Caribbean 115 — the Caucasus 294 — China 138, 140 — Deaf community 21 — French 506 — German 438 — Irish English 486 — Japan 209 — Korea 220–221 — Mongolia 200–201 — North Africa 361, 363, 365 — Occitan 512 — Portuguese 560 — Russian 623 — West Central Africa 372 — see also technology intergenerational transmission — the Baltic states 644, 646–647 — Celtic languages 489, 494, 496 — Central America 67 — China 135 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 176 — Maritime Southeast Asia 243–244 — Mexico 60 — the Pacific 335, 339 — West and Central Africa 376 Iranian world see chapter 21 Ireland see chapter 41 Israeli sociolinguistics see chapter 23 Italy, Italian see chapter 44 Japan, Japanese see chapter 16 Kenya see chapter 32 koiné, koinéization — Arabic 273 — Atlantic Englishes 121–122, 124 — Britain 472 — indigenous languages of Australia 318
661
Subject index — Indo-European languages in South Asia 160 — Italy 520 — the Pacific 336, 364 — South Africa 412 — South Asia 193 — Switzerland 531
— East Central Europe 588 — Estonia 643 — Ireland 484–485 — indigenous languages of North America 44, 49 — indigenous languages of South America 74 — Japan 207 — Luxembourg 545 — New Guinea 550 — Turkic languages 253–254 — United States 17, 20–21, 23 — West and Central Africa 375 — see also language contact language choice — the Baltic states 643–644, 647 — Denmark 456 — East Africa 386 — French language area 514 — North Africa 362 — Rapa Nui 338 — Sri Lanka 150 — West and Central Africa 373 language contact 6 — Arabic 271 — Australia 317, 319 — the Baltic states 643, 646 — Bermuda 121 — British Isles 475 — Canada 33 — the Caucasus 292 — Celtic languages 495 — Central America 69 — China 134, 140 — dialect 127–128, 157, 159, 211, 269–271, 364, 520 — Dutch language area 446–450 — East Africa 382 — Falklands 127, 129 — Hispanic South America 96, 104 — Hungarian 578–580, 582 — Iceland 458 — India 172 — Indian Ocean languages 424 — Italy 522 — Japan 208, 212 — Korea 218, 222 — Lusophone Africa 391–394 — Luxembourg 544 — Maritime Southeast Asia 244 — Middle East and North Africa, — Nepal 152 — Nordic region 457 — Norway 459 — North America, indigenous languages 39–40, 42–43, 48 — the Pacific 334–337
language acquisition — the Baltic states 642–643, 646 — British Isles 469, 473 — Dutch language area 449 — French language area 511 — Indian Ocean languages 424 — indigenous languages of North America 46 — Lusophone Africa 391 — New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) 328 — Turkic languages 248 — United States 16, 20 — see also children language and culture — the Baltic states 647 — Dutch language area 447 — Finland 457 — Israel 283 — Korea 221 — Mainland Southeast Asia 227 — Maya 61 — Mongolian Kazakhs 198 — Southern Africa 404 language attitudes — Arabic 272 — the Baltic states 642, 646 — the Caribbean 108, 111 — the Caucasus 295 — Celtic languages 488 — Central America 66–67, 69 — China 134 — Denmark 455–456 — Dutch language area 449 — East Africa 387 — Indian Ocean languages 427 — Italy 523 — Japan 210 — Nepal 177 — New Guinea 352 — the Pacific 334–336, 340 — Singapore 243 — South Africa 417 — Southern Africa 402 — Sweden 461 — Switzerland 530, 535 language change — Atlantic Englishes 123–124 — the Caribbean 110 — Celtic languages 488, 495 — Denmark 455
662
Subject index — Polish 585–586 — Portuguese 560 — Romania 457 — South Africa — South America, indigenous languages 74–77, 79 — South Asia 194 — Southeast Asia 227 — South Africa 411, 414–416 — Southern Africa 403 — Spain 550 — Sri Lanka 149 — St Helena 125 — Switzerland 530, 535 — Turkic languages 252–254 — Ukraine 632, 637 — Wales 469 — West and Central Africa 377 — see also creole; language change language/dialect distinction 3, 6 — the Balkans 600 — the Caucasus 290 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 171 — German language area 436 — Iranian languages 261 — Luxembourg 542 — New Guinea 351 — West and Central Africa 374, 378 language endangerment, extinction — Celtic languages 488 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 176 — indigenous languages of South America 77 — Japan 208 — Luxembourg 544 — Mexico 54, 57–58, 61 — New Guinea 253 — Singapore 243 — Southern Africa 400 — Turkic languages 253–254 — Ubykh 289 — West and Central Africa 375–377 — see also indigenous languages; language shift language ideology — the Caribbean 111 — Hispanic South America 101, 103–104 — indigenous languages of Australia 317 — Iranian languages 261 — Korea 221 — Latvia 644 — Lithuania 645 — North Africa 362, 366 — Polish 587 — Polynesia 337 — Turkish 252 — United States 18
language maintenance — the Baltic states 643 — Bangladesh 156–157 — Brahui 178 — Central America 67 — East Central Europe 582 — Indo-European languages in South Asia 161 — Manx 492 — the Pacific 236, 340 — Romansh 534–535 — Russian in Israel 284 — South Africa 417 — Sweden 460 — Thailand 231 — Turkic languages 254 — West and Central Africa 377 — see also language policy and planning language policy and planning 4–5 — the Balkans 598–599, 601–602, 605, 608 — the Baltic States 642–643, 645–647 — Burma 228 — Canada 28 — the Caribbean 108, 113–114 — the Caucasus 292–296 — Celtic languages 497 — China 136, 138 — Denmark 456 — Dutch language area 447, 449–450 — Dravidian languages in Southeast Asia 170, 175 — East Africa 383–385, 388 — East Central Europe 582, 588 — European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML) 7, 602 — Hispanic South America 95, 101–103 — Hungary 579 — Iceland 458 — Indian Ocean languages 426 — indigenous languages of North America 41, 44 — indigenous languages of South America 75, 77–79 — Ireland 490 — Israel 279–280, 282 — Italy 523 — Japan 206 — Korea 218, 221–222 — language policy models 603–604 — Lusophone Africa 394–395 — Luxembourg 543 — Malta 571–573 — Mainland Southeast Asia 227 — Maritime Southeast Asia 238–243 — Mongolia 203 — New Guinea 352 — New Zealand 323–324
663
Subject index — Nordic language area 462 — North Africa 363 — Norway 459–460 — the Pacific 339 — Portuguese 563 — Russian 615 — Scots 467 — Scottish Gaelic 491 — Slovakia 580 — South Africa 417–418 — Southern Africa 400–402 — South Asia 185, 194 — Sri Lanka 149, 179 — Sweden 460 — Switzerland 530, 534–535 — Thailand 230–231 — Turkish language reform (TLR) 249–251 — Ukraine 631, 637 — Welsh 493 — see also education, schooling; language revitalization; politics; standard language, standardization; State language retention 4 language revitalization — Central America 60 — Francoprovençal 512 — Mexico 54, 58–60 — indigenous languages of North America 39–42, 46–47, 49 — indigenous languages of South America 79 — Southern Africa 405 — Ukraine 632 — see also indigenous languages; language endangerment, extinction; language policy and planning language rights — the Balkans 605 — the Baltic states 642–643, 645, 647 — Breton 494 — Canada 32 — the Caribbean 114 — East Africa — East Central Europe: universal language rights 579 — indigenous languages of South America 78 — Israel 282 — Japan 209 — Norway 459 — South Africa 414 — Thailand 230 — Welsh 492 language shift — Celtic languages 490, 494, 496 — Central America 68 — Dravidian languages in Southeast Asia 174, 176 — East Africa 382, 388
— East Central Europe 579–580 — Estonia 644 — Iranian world — Ireland 480–482, 485 — Italy 521 — Maritime Southeast Asia 238, 242–244 — Mexico 54, 56–57, 60 — Russia 615 — indigenous languages of North America 42, 47 — indigenous languages of South America 75, 77, 79 — Lusophone Africa 395 — New Guinea 353–354 — the Pacific 333, 335 — Pakistan 154 — South Asia 185 — St Helena 125 — Ukraine 637 — Wales 470 — West and Central Africa 377 — see also borrowing; diglossia; code-mixing language use 5 — Arabic 271–272 — Australia 307 — the Baltic states 642 — Brazil 85, 93 — the Caribbean 110–111 — the Caucasus 292–296 — Central America 67 — China 134, 138–139 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 170, 174, 178–179 — Dutch language area 449–450 — East Africa 384, 388 — East Central Europe 582–583 — Estonia 643–644 — French language area 507, 514 — Hispanic South America 95, 104 — indigenous languages of Australia 316 — indigenous languages of North America 39, 42, 46, 49 — indigenous languages of South America 80 — Iranian languages 262 — Ireland 482 — Italy 520–521 — Japan 206 — Latvia 644–645 — Lithuania 645–646 — Luxembourg 543–545 — Nepal 152 — New Guinea 350, 352 — New Zealand 324 — Nordic region 456, 460–461 — North Africa 362–364 — the Pacific 333, 337, 339, 341 — Pakistan 154
664
Subject index — Slovakia 580–581 — Spain 553 — South Africa 418 — Southern Africa 404 — Switzerland 531, 535 — Turkic languages 248, 251, 253 — Ukraine 632, 636–639 — United States 20 — Welsh 469, 493 — West and Central Africa 372–377 language variation 2 — Arabic 271 — Bermuda 123 — Brazil 85, 90, 93 — British Isles — Canada 34 — Celtic languages 497 — Denmark 455 — Dutch language area 446–448 — Finland 456–457 — German 436 — Hispanic South America 96, 103 — India 157 — indigenous languages of North America 39, 48 — indigenous languages of the Pacific 338 — Italy 519 — Korea 218–220 — Malagasy 429 — Maritime Southeast Asia 238, 244–245 — New Guinea 335 — New Zealand 324–329 — Nordic region 460, 462 — Norway 459 — Poland 587 — Russia 614–616 — Scotland 468 — Slovakia 581 — Southern Africa 403–404 — Sri Lanka 150–151 — Sweden 462 — United States 15–20 — see also dialect; dialectology; region language vitality — the Caucasus 296 — China 136 — Estonia 643–644 — ethnolinguistic vitality 46, 49 — India 157 — Nepal 152, 177 — New Zealand 324 — Pakistan 154 — Quechua 77 — South Asia 193–194 — Switzerland 534 — West and Central Africa 376 — Zambia 402, 405
Laos see chapter 18 Latin 502, 561, 588 — see also alphabets Latinx 16 Latvia see chapter 54 legal, judiciary issues — the Balkans 602, 604 — Canada 35 — the Caucasus 296 — Celtic languages 488 — China 135 — Hispanic South America 102–104 — Iranian languages 260 — Malta 571 — Mongolia 203 — Norway 458–459 — South Africa 418 — Sri Lanka 150 — Switzerland 534 — Ukraine 637–638 lexical borrowing 212, 291, 339, 415, 438, 496, 502 lexicon — Australia 318 — Cambodia 234 — the Caucasus 292 — French 501–504 — German (Swiss) 532 — Indo-European languages in South Asia 159 — Media Lengua 76 — Mexico 55, 62 — New Guinea 351 — the Pacific 341 — Portugal 560–561 — Rapa Nui 338 — South African Sign Language (SASL) 414 — Tibeto-Burman languages 188 — Turkic languages 253 — Turkish 250 — Ukraine 634 — United States 20–21 — Vietnamese 236 — see also borrowing; lexical borrowing lingua franca 2–5 — Arabic — Bahasa Indonesia 239 — Belizean Creole 68 — Car 193 — Brussels 501 — the Caucasus 290–291, 295 — Chichewa 401 — Dioula 377 — Dutch 239 — East Africa 382, 384–385 — English 124, 240, 248, 251 — French 501
665
Subject index — Guinea-Bissau 395 — Hindustani 160 — Hiri Motu 351 — indigenous languages of Australia 316–317 — indigenous languages of North America 40 — Japan 209, 213 — Kriolo 395 — Lhasa dialect (of Tibetan) 187 — Lusophone Africa 392, 395 — Malawi 401 — Maritime Southeast Asia 239–240, 243 — Mexico 56, 58 — Nepali 186 — New Guinea 350–354 — Portuguese 395 — Russian 290, 295, 638 — South Pacific — Tangkhul 189 — Tok Pisin 350 — Tristan da Cunha 124 — Tshangla 190 — Turkey 248, 251 — Ukraine 638 — West and Central Africa 372–373, 375–377 linguistic landscapes 7 — the Baltic states 643–645 — China 134–136, 140 — East Africa 383–384, 387–388 — East Central Europe 582, 585 — indigenous languages of Australia 318 — Indo-European languages in South Asia 155 — Israel 282 — Italy 523 — Korea 222 — Luxembourg 545 — Malta 570 — Maritime Southeast Asia 245 — Nordic region 457, 459, 461 — North Africa 362 — South Africa 417–418 — Southern Africa 405 — South Asia 194, 201 — Southeast Asia 230 — Spain 554 — Turkic languages 252, 254 Lithuania see chapter 54 low-back merger 14, 23, 412
— the Balkans 604 — the Baltic states 644–645 — Canada 32–33 — the Caribbean 114 — the Caucasus 293, 295 — Celtic languages 488, 495–497 — East Africa 387 — East Central Europe 587 — French language area 505, 511–513 — German language area 437–439 — Hispanic South America 102 — Indian Ocean languages 425, 429 — Indo-European languages in South Asia 150, 156, 162 — Iranian languages 265, 272–273 — Ireland 484 — Israel 285 — Japan 208, 212 — Korea 218–221 — Malta 570, 572 — Maritime Southeast Asia 243, 244 — Mongolia 201–202, 203 — New Guinea 354 — New Zealand 324 — North Africa 361–362, 365–366 — radio 99, 198, 233, 293, 352, 361, 363, 413, 416, 484, 495, 508, 542, 614 — South Africa 412 — Southern Africa 402 — Southeast Asia 228, 233 — Spain 551 — Switzerland 535, 542, 544 — television 155, 202, 209, 220, 221, 233, 251, 272, 273, 293, 361, 363, 508, 531, 614 — Turkic languages 250–251 — Ukraine 633, 636, 638 — United States 21 — see also internet Melanesia see chapter 28 methodology — the Caucasus 289 — China 134, 139–140 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 174 — East Central Europe 581 — Hispanic South America 99 — indigenous languages of North America 45–46 — Indo-European languages in South Asia 151, 156–157 — Mexico 58, 60 — New Zealand 329 — North Africa 365 — the Pacific 337 — Sylheti 156 — United States 18, 23 — West and Central Africa 373
Macedonia see chapter 51 Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines see chapter 19 masculinity 17, 90, 92, 211, 307, 365, 461 — see also gender; femininity media — Australia 306, 318
666
Subject index minority languages 3–4 — the Balkans 598–599, 608–609: European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML) 7, 435, 602–607 — the Baltic states 643–644, 647 — Burma 228–229 — Cambodia 234 — the Caucasus 293, 295–296 — China 136, 138 — Dravidian languages of Southeast Asia 174 — endangered 227 — East Central Europe 582 — Estonia 644 — Finland 456 — German language area 435–436 — Italy, 521, 523 — Japan 208–209, 214 — Laos 233 — Lusophone Africa 393 — Luxembourg 542 — Mainland Southeast Asia 227–231, 233–234, 236 — Maritime Southeast Asia 242, 244 — Nordic region 462 — North Africa 363–364 — Norway 459 — Poland 586–587 — South Africa 418 — Southern Africa 401–402 — South Pacific — Spain 551–553, 555 — Sweden 460 — Thailand 230–231 — Vietnam 236 — West and Central Africa 377 — see also indigenous languages; language rights monolingualism — the Balkans 608 — the Baltic states 647 — Bangladesh 157 — indigenous languages of North America 43 — Israel 278 — Italy 523 — Mexico 55, 58 — New Zealand 4, 324 — the Pacific 340 — Puerto Rico 112 — Southern Africa 403 — Ukraine 632 — West Central Africa 372, 378 — see also bilingualism Montenegro see chapter 51 Morocco see Middle East and North Africa (MENA) morphology and syntax — Breton 497
— see also dialectology; variationist sociolinguistics Mexico see chapter 4 Micronesia see chapter 28 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) see chapters 22 and 30 migration 2–3 — Arabic 270 — Australia 306 — the Baltic states 643, 645–646 — Bermudian English 121 — Bhutan 151 — British Isles 468, 470, 473, 475 — Canada 28–30 — the Caribbean 108, 112 — the Caucasus 290, 292 — Celtic languages 489, 491–492 — China 133–135, 139 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 170, 174, 176 — Dutch language area 449 — East Central Europe 586 — Falkland Islands 127 — Finland 456 — German — Hispanic South America 95, 99, 104 — indigenous languages of North America 48 — indigenous languages of South America 75, 77–79 — Ireland 478, 482 — Israel 281, 285 — Israeli Russian 283–284 — Italy 520, 522 — Japan 208–213 — Lusophone Africa 394 — Luxembourg 542 — Mainland Southeast Asia 228 — Maldives 148 — Maritime Southeast Asia 238, 243 — Nepal 177 — New Zealand 323–325 — Nordic region 462 — the Pacific 333–336, 340, 342 — Russia 618 — South Africa 416–417 — Southern Africa 405 — South Asia 186 — Spain 550, 552–555 — Sri Lanka 178 — Sweden 460 — Switzerland 534–535 — Turkic languages 252–254 — Ukraine 635 — United States 15 — Welsh 492 — Yiddish 278
667
Subject index — Gaelic 496 — Portugal 562 — United States 20 — see also grammar mother tongue — the Balkans 603 — Bangladesh 176 — Burma 228 — the Caucasus 293 — China 138 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 171, 173–174, 176 — East Africa 384–385 — Hungarian 577 — Hungary 579 — Indian Ocean languages 427 — Laos 232 — Maritime Southeast Asia 240–242 — Nepal 152 — Nordic region 455 — Pakistan 155 — Portuguese 560, 564 — South Asia 185 — Southern Africa 402 — Spanish 56 — Sri Lanka 150 — Sweden 460 — Tamil 174 — Thailand 229 — West and Central Africa 374 — Yiddish 4 multimodal, multimodality 19, 60, 61, 115, 386, 584, 642, 644–645 music 416 — Brazilian funk 88 — the Caribbean 111, 113 — Central America 68 — dancehall 113 — East Africa 387 — electro shaabi 366 — French language area 513 — gnawa 366 — hip hop 61, 405, 416 — Jamaica 110 — metal 366 — Mexico 60–61 — Mongolia 201 — North Africa 365–366 — punk 366 — raï 366 — reggae 387 — South Africa 416 — Southern Africa 405
New Zealand see chapter 27 Nordic region see chapter 39 Northern Cyprus see chapter 20 Northern Ireland see chapter 40 Norway see chapter 39 official languages 2, 5, 6 — Afrikaans 401, 413 — Albanian 599, 606 — Amazigh 363 — Amharic 383 — Arabic 279, 285, 361, 364, 382–383, 425 — Armenian 294–295 — Azerbaijani 294–295 — the Balkans 599, 603–607 — Baltic states 643 — Bangladesh 156 — Basque 513 — Bengali 156 — Bhutia (Denjong Tibetan) 186 — Bosnian 599, 605–606 — Brazil — Britain 467 — Bulgarian 599 — Burma 228 — Canada 28–29, 34 — the Caribbean 108, 112, 114 — the Caucasus 294–296 — Central America 66 — Croatian 599, 605–606 — Danish 454 — Dutch 348, 445–446 — Dutch language area 445–446, 449 — East Central Europe 582 — English 154, 157, 175, 239, 240, 279, 338, 348, 382, 401–402, 413, 425, 467, 478, 569 — Fiji 338 — Filipino 239 — Finland 456–457, 462 — Finnish 456 — Finnish Sign Language 456 — French 383, 392, 401, 425, 530, 532, 542 — Georgian 294–295 — German 348, 401, 435, 530, 532, 542, 544 — Germany 435 — Greek 599 — Hebrew 279, 283, 285 — Hindi 157, 175, 338 — Hungarian 582 — India 157, 175, 184 — Indian Ocean languages 425 — Indonesia 239 — Indonesian 348 — Irish 478 — isiXhosa 418 — Israel 279, 283, 285
the Netherlands see chapter 38 New Guinea see chapter 29
668
Subject index — Italian 530 — Japan 208, 210, 212 — Kannada 172 — Karelian 456 — Korea 217, 222 — Kurux 172 — Kven 459 — Laos 231 — Lepcha 186 — Limbu 186 — Lusophone Africa 391–395 — Luxembourg 542, 544, 546 — Luxembourgish 542 — Malagasy 401, 425 — Malay 239–240, 348 — Malaysia 239 — Maldives 148 — Malta 569, 572 — Maltese 569 — Mandarin 230 — Maritime Southeast Asia 239–240 — Macedonian 599 — Mexico — Mizo (Lushai) 189 — Mongolia 197–198 — Montenegrin 599, 606 — Ndebele 401 — Nepal 152 — Nepali 186 — New Guinea 348, 353 — New Zealand 323–324 — New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) 323–324 — Newar 185 — Norwegian 459 — North Africa 361, 363–364, 382, 383 — Pakistan 154, 178 — Portuguese 240, 391–395, 560 — Romanes 459 — Romani 456, 459 — Romanian 599, 607 — Romansh 530, 534-Rumantsch Grischun 535 — Sámi 456, 459 — Serbian 599, 605–606 — Serbo-Croatian 599 — Sesotho 401 — Shona 401 — Shikomori 425 — Singapore 240 — Sinhala 179 — Siswati 401 — Slovak 582 — Somali 382 — South Africa 411, 413, 417–418 — South African Sign Language (SASL) 417 — South America
— South Asia 163, 172, 174, 184–186, 189 — Southern Africa 400–401 — Spain 550, 552, 554 — Spanish 95, 239 — Sri Lanka 150, 172, 179 — Swedish 456 — Switzerland 530, 532, 534 — Tamazight 363 — Tamil 172, 179, 240 — te reo Māori 323 — Telugu 172 — Tetun (Tetum) 240 — Thailand 229 — Tibetan 184 — Tigrinya 383 — Timor-Leste 240 — Tripuri 185 — Turkish 249, 250 — Urdu 178 orthography — Amazigh 363 — Brahui 178 — Burma 189 — the Caucasus — Francoprovençal 512 — French 509, 511–512 — Hindi/Urdu 261 — Iranian languages 261–262 — Ireland 485 — Irish 490 — Khmer 233 — Korean 222 — Lepcha 190 — Lao 232 — Luxembourg 542, 544–545 — Mexico 59 — North America, indigenous languages 44 — the Pacific 340 — Portuguese 560 — Serbian/Croatian 261 — South Asia 191 — spelling 115, 228, 232, 234, 250, 293, 485, 511, 533, 542, 544–545, 572 — Tajik 261 — Thai (Lanna) 230 — Vietnamese 234 — see also alphabets; written language Pacific see chapter 28 perception studies — Brazil 86, 88–90 — Britain 474 — Canada 31 — Central America 70 — Dutch language area 448 — French language area 508
669
Subject index — Korea 222 — South Africa 414 — United States 14, 21, 22–23 personae 17–18, 79, 90, 244 Philippines see chapter 19 philology 55, 69, 146, 149 phonation 19, 233 — see also voice quality phonetics — Italy 519–520 — Malta 570 — Mexico 55 — Portugal 561–532 — Russia 614, 616–617, 619, 621 — Switzerland 531–532 — Ukraine 634 — United States 19–20, 23 — see also dialectology; acoustic phonetics; sociophonetics phonology — Australian English 303 — Bangladesh 157 — Bermudian English 122 — Burmese 228 — the Caribbean 110 — German 436 — Hispanic South America 96 — indigenous languages of North America 48 — Iranian languages 262, 264 — Ireland 480 — Israel 284 — Italy 520 — Malayalam 161 — Malta 570 — Portugal 562 — Sweden 461 — Switzerland 532 — Thai 231 — Thailand 230 — Tsotsitaal 415 — United States 14 — 19–20 — Vietnamese 234 pidgin — Arabic-based pidgins 271, 273 — Australia 317 — Cameroon Pidgin 373 — East Africa 383 — Hawai’i 21 — Indian Ocean languages 423 — Japan 213 — Maritime South East Asia 238 — the Pacific 334, 336 — West and Central Africa 372, 373, 375–376 — see also New Guinea; creole
pluricentric, pluricentricity — East Central Europe 576 — Dutch language area 446 — German 532 — Italian 519, 534 — Malta 569, 573 — Portuguese 560, 562 — Russian 634 Poland see chapter 50 political speech 405 politics — Brazil 211 — German language area 437 — East Africa 387 — East Central Europe 587 — French language area 502 — India 157 — Korea 219 — Lusophone Africa 392 — North Africa 365 — Pakistan 154–155 — South Africa 417–418 — Southern Africa 401 — Ukraine 638 — West and Central Africa 376 — Zambia 405 — see also the Balkans; class; language ideology; language policy and planning; power; State Polynesia see chapter 28 popular culture — East Africa 383, 386 — Madagascar 405 — Mexico 62 — Mongolia 201 — Southern Africa 405 Portugal see chapter 48 Portuguese see chapters 48, 33 and 7 power — the Balkans 603 — the Baltic states 642, 644 — Cambodia 227 — Canada 29, 31 — Central America 67–68 — China 136, 139 — East Central Europe 587 — German 438 — Hispanic South America 103–104 — indigenous languages of North America 41 — India 172 — indigenous languages of South America 80 — Japan 206 — Lusophone Africa 392, 394–395 — Maritime Southeast Asia 243 — Mexico 55, 60 — New Zealand 324
670
Subject index — Pakistan 154–155 — Portugal 562, Russia 620 — South Africa 413, 417 — Southern Africa 400, 402–403 — Ukraine 636 — West and Central Africa 376–377 — see also language policy and planning; politics; State pragmatics, discourse and conversation — Arabic 270 — Australia 307, 315 — the Baltic states 643 — Britain 471–472 — the Caribbean 111 — the Caucasus 296 — Dutch language area 447, 450 — East Africa 384–387 — East Central Europe 582–584 — Finnish 457 — French 507–511 — German language area 437, 439 — Hispanic South America 95, 100–101, 103 — honorifics 3, 22, 153, 208, 212, 217–218, 221 — Indian Ocean languages 428 — Iranian languages 259 — Ireland 483 — Israel — Italy 519, 521 — Japan — Korea 218–220, 222 — Malta 570–571 — New Guinea 352 — New Zealand 324, 327–328 — Nordic region — North Africa 362, 364–365 — Portugal 562–563 — Southeast Asia 230 — Southern Africa 402, 404–405 — South Pacific — Switzerland 531 — Tæ’arof: discourse marking of status and politeness 265–266 — Turkey 251 — United States 14, 16, 18–23 — West and Central Africa 374 prescriptivism 315, 413, 498, 587 prosody — Australia 304, 315 — French language area 510 — India 162 — Italy 519 — Turkish 248
— Arabic 270, 273, 282, 364 — Australia 303–305, 308 — the Balkans 602 — the Baltic states 643, 646 — Bengal 160 — British Isles see chapter 40 — British Sign Language (BSL) 474 — Canada 29–31 — Celtic languages 495 — Central America 70 — Czechia 583 — Denmark 455 — Dutch language area 448 — France 511 — French 424, 502, 507, 509–513 — French Antilles 115 — German 436 — Hispanic South America 98, 100–101, 104 — indigenous languages of North America 39, 43 — Ireland 480 — Korea 217 — Mexico 58 — Iranian languages 259, 261, 263, 265–266 — Italy 519–520 — Maltese 570–571 — Maritime Southeast Asia 244 — New Guinea 351 — New Zealand 326, 328 — the Pacific 341, 336, 341 — Philippines 239 — Polish 586 — Russia 613, 616, 618–619, 623 — South Africa 413–414 — South Asia — Sri Lanka 178 — St Helena 126 — Switzerland 531–532 — Thai 230 — United States 13–17, 19–20, 22–23 — Vietnamese 235 — see also dialect; dialectology; language variation; variationist sociolinguistics religion — Buddhism 147, 184, 187, 194, 198, 227, 231–232 — the Caucasus 290–291 — Christian 174, 185, 202, 229, 279, 282, 285, 290–291, 383 — Hispanic South America 103 — identity 607 — India 172 — Indian Ocean languages 425, 429 — Indo-European languages in South Asia 146–147 — Islam 148, 155, 198, 249–250, 293, 385, 429 — Israel 278
racism 16, 61, 336 rational choice theory 386 region, regional variation
671
Subject index — New Zealand 326 — North Africa 363 — ritual speech 266, 334, 377, 404 — South Asia 188 — Southern Africa 405 — Zoroastrianism 261 repertoire 19, 40, 44, 78, 80, 150, 157, 162, 266, 315, 461, 534 — stylistic 111 — ethnolinguistic 115 — multilingual 312, 317–320, 372, 374, 415–416, 428, 457, 521–522, 555, 645–646 Roma, Romani languages 290, 456, 459, 461, 468, 552, 605, 607 — Central Eastern Europe 578–580, 582, 585 — Mexico 54 Romance languages 493 — Italo-Romance 6, see chapter 44; see chapters 43–48 Romania see chapter 51 Russian see chapter 52 Rwanda see chapter 382
social networks theory 17, 49, 377 society and language 308 — see also class; language and culture; language attitudes sociology of language 2, 7 — Breton 494 — Czech Republic (Czechia) 583 — Dutch language area 449 — East Africa 383 — Hispanic South America 103 — indigenous languages of South America 74 — New Guinea 350 — Nordic region 462 — Russia 613 — South Africa 411 — Sweden 461 — Turkic languages 248 sociophonetics — Australia 303 — the Caucasus 296 — Italy 519 — South Africa 412–413 — United States 19 — West Central Africa 372 Somalia see chapter 32 South Africa see chapter 35 South America, indigenous languages see chapter 6 South Asia see chapter 14 Spain, Spanish see chapter 47; see also chapters 8 and 4–6 speech community theory 376, 493 — Schneider’s model 243 Sprachbund 262, 391, 598 standard language, standardization 3–7 — Albanian 601 — Arabic 269, 272–273, 280–281, 362–363, 365 — Armenian 294 — Asia — the Balkans 600–601 — Bengalis 160 — Bosnian 600 — Brahui 178 — Brazil 87 — Breton 497 — Bulgarian 601 — Burmese 229 — the Caribbean 112, 115 — the Caucasus 295 — China 134–135 — Chinese 140, 459 — Czech Republic (Czechia) 585 — Denmark 454–455 — Dutch language area 448 — East Central Europe 576
Scotland see chapter 40 semiotics 79, 80, 115, 221, 244, 245, 365, 388, 405, 416, 554, 645 Semitic languages see chapters 22–24, 30 and 49 Serbia see chapter 51 Singapore see chapter 19 slang — argots 217, 272, 585, 614, 622 — Australia 306, 315 — Burundi 375 — Czechia (Czech Republic) 585, East Central Europe 578, 581, 585 — Hungarian 578 — Israel 281 — Korea 217 — Maritime Southeast Asia 245 — Russia 619 — South Africa 415 — United States 16 — West and Central Africa 372, 375 Slovenia see chapter 51 social justice 16, 48, 394 — sociolinguistic justice 523 social media 16, 77, 114–115, 201, 202–203, 244, 251, 294, 366, 385, 418, 448, 455, 486, 542, 545, 571–572, 584 — Facebook 114, 201, 203, 365, 373, 403, 545, 560, 643 — Instagram 114 — Twitter 366, 372, 469, 560 — WhatsApp 114, 372, 377, 405 — YouTube 114–115
672
Subject index — English 14, (Belizean) 112, 129, 151, 162, 316, 319, 403, 473–474, 571 — Fijian 339 — Filipino 239 — French 32, 33, 424, 508, 511, 513, 514, 532 — Greek 601–602 — Hungarian 577 — Hispanic South America 103 — Indonesian 350 — Iranian languages 259–260, 262, 264–266 — Italian 519–521, 534 — Jamaica 151 — Japan 206, 209, 211 — Kannada 174 — Khmer 234 — Korea 222 — Lao 232 — Lusophone Africa 391, 395 — Luxembourg 514, 542, 544, 546 — Macedonian 601 — Malagasy 429 — Maldives 148 — Maltese 570–572 — Marathi 174 — Maritime Southeast Asia 239 — Mexico 55 — Montenegrin 600 — Nordic area 462 — Norway 458–459 — Occitan 512 — Poland 586–587 — Portuguese 393, 395, 560 — Rumantsch Grischun 534 — Russian 618–621 — Sinhala 149 — Slovak 582 — South America indigenous languages 78–79, 80 — Spanish 55, 69 — standard German (SG) 435–438, 514, 530–532, 534 — Telugu 175 — Thai 230–231 — Turkey 250 — Turkish 253 — Ukrainian 633 — Vietnamese 235–236 — see also language policy and planning State — accommodationist principle 601, 604, 607, 609 — the Balkans 604, 607 — Canada 34 — China 134 — France 502–503 — India 157 — Israel 283 — Japan 206, 210
— Mongolia 198–200, 203 — nation-state principle 39, 134, 137, 147, 260, 279, 291, 598, 604, 607–609 — Spain 551 — Tajikistan 264 — Uzbekistan 265 — see also language policy and planning; politics superdiverse, superdiversity 312, 324, 377, 449, 473, 585, 642, 645 Sweden see chapter 39 Switzerland see chapter 45 synchronic issues 49, 104, 136, 140, 149, 161, 308, 412, 447 — see also diachronic issues Tajikistan see chapter 21 Tanzania see chapter 32 technology — China 137 — Israel 279 — Korea 220 — Latvia 645 — Mongolia 198, 200–201 — linguistic impact of new technologies 200–201 — the Pacific 336 — South Africa 417–418 — see also internet; social media Thailand see chapter 18 third-wave sociolinguistic approaches, methodologies 86, 315, 320, 365 translation — the Caribbean 112 — China 134, 136, 138 — Dravidian languages in South Asia 174 — East Central Europe 582 — Israel 282 — Malta 572 — Mongolia 203 — South Africa 417–418 — Southern Africa 405 — Turkey 248 translanguaging — the Baltic states 642–643 — Celtic languages 498 — China 135 — East Africa 385–386 — Estonia 643 Hungary 580 — Irish 490 — Israel 280 — Malta 571–572 — Romani 580 — South Africa 413, 418 — Southern Africa 403, 405 — Welsh 498
673
Subject index — East Central Europe 584, 588 — Finland 456–457 — Hispanic South America 95–101, 104 — Hungarian 581 — Iceland 458 — indigenous languages of Australia 312 — indigenous languages of South America 74 — Italy 518–520 — Korea 219–220 — Labovian 55, 85, 304, 391, 403, 455–457, 459–460, 581 — Lusophone Africa 393 — Luxembourg 544 — Malta 571 — Maritime Southeast Asia 244 — Mexico 54–55 — morphosyntactic variation 220, 304, 327–328, 459 — Nordic region 462 — Norway 460 — Russia 615 — Southern Africa 403 — St Helena 126 — United States 13, 18, 22 — vowel variation, variability 97, 110, 220, 303–304, 325–326, 509 — West and Central Africa 372 — see also code-mixing; code-switching; language contact; language shift; language use; language variation; region
triglossia 278 Turkey, Northern Cyprus and other Turkic states see chapter 20 Uganda see East Africa 382 Ukraine see chapter 53 United States see chapter 1 uptalk 304, 327 urban sociolinguistics — the Baltic states 645–646 — Brazil 87 — British Isles 468, 470–471 — China 134 — Denmark 455 — Dutch language area 449 — East Africa 386–387 — East Central Europe 577–578, 581, 588 — French language area 508, 510–511, 513 — German language area 437–438 — Hispanic South America 104 — indigenous languages of South America 77 — Indo-European languages of South Asia 159–160 — Ireland 479 — Italy 523 — Japan 213 — Mexico 54 — Nordic region 460 — North Africa 362, 364–365 — Norway 459 — Russia 613, 618 — South Africa 415–416 — Southern Africa 402–403 — Spain 550, 554–555 — Sri Lanka 150 — Sweden 461 — Thai 230 — Tok Pisin 350 — Ukraine 635 — West and Central Africa 375, 377 Uzbekistan see chapter 21 variationist sociolinguistics 1, 6 — Afrikaans 414 — Arabic 270–271, 273 — Brazil 85, 89 — British Isles 467 — Canada 29 — the Caribbean 110–111 — the Caucasus 296 — Central America 67, 69 — consonantal variation 220, 304, 326–327, 510 — Czechia 584 — Denmark 455 — Dutch language area 446, 448
Vietnam see chapter 18 voice quality 19, 327, 468 — see also phonation Wales see chapters 40 and 41 West and Central Africa (WCA) see chapter 31 women — Australia 307–308 — Bengali 160 — Bishnupriya 159 — Brazil 87, 92 — Britain 471, 473 — Cairo 270 — the Caribbean 111 — East Central Europe 587 — French 504–506, 510 — Hispanic South America 89, 100–101 — India 158 — Ireland 482 — Israel 281 — Japan 211–212 — Korea 217, 223 — Lebanon 271 — Malta 570 — Mexico 97
674
Subject index — Muskogee 16 — Nepali 152–153 — New Zealand 326–328 — North Africa 365 — the Pacific 336 — Punjabi 154 — Russia 622–623 — Saudi Arabia 273 — Southern Africa 404 — South Asia 192 — Switzerland 439, 533 — Turkic languages 252 — Ukraine 363 — United States 15–17, 21 — workplace 92, 212, 504–505, 570 — see also gender; femininity workplace — Brunei 239 — Dutch language area 450 — French 504 — German 438 — Japanese 211 — Mongolia 198 — New Zealand 324 — Slovakia 581 — Sri Lanka 151 — Tanzania 386 — Wales 467 — see also women World Englishes 125–126, 150, 222, 242, 251, 404, 413 written language — Burma 229 — the Caribbean 114–115 — the Caucasus 293, 296 — East Africa 384, 387 — Francoprovençal 512 — French 505–507 — Gaelic languages 489, 495–496 — Indian Ocean languages 429 — Iranian world 264, 267 — Ireland 480 — Israel 278 — Italy 521, 523 — Japan 206, 208, 212 — Khasi 192 — Korea 222 — Laos 233 — Luxembourg 542, 545
— Mongolia 199 — new technology influence on 267, 365–366 — North Africa 362–363, 365–366 — the Pacific 336, 338 — Santali 191 — Switzerland 532–533 — Turkish language reform (TLR) 250 — United States 19 — Vietnamese 235 — West and Central Africa 372 — see also alphabets; orthography young people — the Baltic states 642, 644, 646 — Brazil 88 — Breton 497 — British Isles 470–471, 473–474 — the Caribbean — Celtic languages 491 — Denmark 455–456 — Dutch language area 449 — East Africa 383, 386–387 — Finland 457 — French 503, 507–508, 510–511, 513, 615 — German 437 — Iceland 458 — indigenous languages 44, 77–78, 315 — Iranian languages 265 — Maritime Southeast Asia 245 — Mexico 60–61 — Middle East and North Africa — Moldavia 579 — Mozambique 354 — New Guinea 353 — New Zealand 323–324 — Nordic region 461 — North Africa 362, 365–366 — the Pacific 337, 340 — Russia 619–620 — South Asia 150, 156–157 — South Africa 412, 415–416, 418 — Southern Africa 402–403 — Sweden 461 — Switzerland 531 — Turkish 251 — urban youth vernaculars 508, 511 — West and Central Africa 375, 377 — see also age; children
675