Gumprez - Studying Language, Culture and Society - Sociolinguistics or Linguistic Anthropology
Gumprez - Studying Language, Culture and Society - Sociolinguistics or Linguistic Anthropology
INTRODUCTION
As the papers in this issue show, the study of language, culture, and society has, and always will have, multiple disciplinary roots. In this commentary, we argue that what we may now regard as two traditions, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, are in fact historically interrelated approaches. This raises the question as to whether we should really draw a distinction between the two at all. We begin by considering why sociolinguistics, as a field of enquiry, came to be seen as separate from the broader fields of anthropological linguistics and formal linguistics. As Dell Hymes (1972: 35) comments in Directions in Sociolinguistics (Gumperz and Hymes 1972), to claim that sociolinguistics is a distinct field is to suggest that there are both problems and types of linguistic data that have not been studied before. Hymess statement, published at the beginning of the 1970s, argues that staking out a newly designated disciplinary emphasis does not mean that linguistics is theoretically lacking, but rather that there are problem areas and sets of issues that previous methods of analysis overlooked. While linguistic anthropology can trace its origins back nearly a century, owing its pedigree to the much earlier anthropological linguistics and fieldwork traditions, sociolinguistics can be seen as a recent development with a relatively short history and what is more, one that is a lived history for many of us still working in the field, with all the individual variations of emphasis that this implies. Let us therefore start with a personal account, originally presented at the 2006 Sociolinguistics Symposium meeting, where most of the papers in this special issue were first presented, to place some of the intellectual issues in context. We then go on to unravel the strands that influenced the development of sociolinguistics and to explore the long-term history of the relationship between sociolinguistics and what we now call linguistic anthropology.
C The authors 2008 Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA
533
534
grammars, and the more recent British functional linguistics of J. R. Firth at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. For me this meant an exposure to new ways of looking at language outside of the American tradition and outside of the usual academic disciplinary divisions to focus instead on a joint eld-based enterprise. Research emerging from that collaboration was published as a special issue of the International Journal of American Linguistics titled Linguistic Diversity in South Asia (Ferguson and Gumperz 1960), with articles by scholars associated with the Deccan College Institute. William Labov (personal communication) was the rst to recognize the signicance of the Indian research for sociolinguistics when he commented that the special issue was the rst set of studies that centered on sociolinguistic issues. The more immediate U.S. contribution of this work to the development of sociolinguistics was in bringing together interdisciplinary groups of scholars studying related issues of socioeconomic development, each from their own disciplinary perspective. This work soon received national attention, rst by the Association for Asian Studies, which set up a committee on South Asian languages in the 1950s, and later by the Social Science Research Council. In the 1960s the latter organized the Committee on Sociolinguistics with a membership drawn largely from the earlier AAS committee, thus building up a new disciplinary focus out of an overlapping set of academic interests and friendship groupings (Murray 1998). It was here that sociolinguistics, under that name, began its (inter)disciplinary life.
Despite their differences, these areas of research shared a theoretical view of the local community as the site of language use and a methodological commitment to using fieldwork as the best way to obtain information about such language use.
Journal compilation
C C The authors 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008
535
536
Journal compilation
537
rites such as are found in small, traditional, largely face-to-face societies, as well as urban minority speech events and routines (Bauman and Sherzer 1974). Later on, as more empirical data became available, work began to focus on the in-depth interpretive examination of the discourse that constitutes the speech event. The basic insight here is that although research must be rooted in fieldwork in local communities, traditional analysts community-level cultural categories do not demonstrably reflect what motivates or accounts for speakers action in everyday encounters. So far, however, most researchers were concerned with specifying what such implicit knowledge is, but not on how it enters into interpretation. Later, sociolinguistics began to address this problem. Initially, linguistic anthropologists relied on ethnographic observations to reveal the cultural assumptions that underlie interpretation; similarly, ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts used close analysis of talk to understand interaction from the point of view of its participants. Somewhat later, another approach emerged that, like conversation analysis, focuses directly on the organization of speech exchanges, but takes a broader view of language as communicating both content and metapragmatic or indexical information about content. This later approach has become known as interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982, 2001). In this special issue, the analyses by Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall and by Jack Sidnell build on these traditions of scholarship in different ways by examining how the social actions accomplished through linguistic interaction - which may range as widely as the negotiation of ethnoracial labels, the interactional manifestation of language ideologies, and patterns of repair are based on local interpretive repertoires.
538
educational access as well as an emphasis on the transmission of cultural values across generations through childrens socialization; and awareness of the dangers of totalitarian regimes and how these could be combated through understanding the workings of political rhetoric. It was these issues that gave early sociolinguistics much of its agenda. The linguistic dimensions of such questions were widely pursued by linguists in the United States; in Britain, they were explored primarily in the work of Basil Bernstein, who alone among sociologists recognized the important role of language in cultural transmission, and thus in the reproduction of social ordering and its class divisions (Bernstein 1972). These developments suggest that in response to the question we posed in the beginning, it may be said that sociolinguistics became separated from anthropology not because it lacked a social theory but because of its early engagement with specific problems of Western industrialized societies at a time when anthropologists still tended to focus their concerns on small-scale groups in non-Western societies. Sociolinguistics took over existing sociological theories in order to apply linguistic analyses to solve contemporary societal problems, such as those of increasing equity and access to U. S. education (Cazden, John and Hymes 1972). While the methods of sociolinguistics were innovative, the socialtheoretical assumptions of sociology went largely unchallenged in sociolinguistic work that took established social theories and their categorizations as a given. In this issue, Monica Heller explores this question in her critique of the use of received sociological categories and concepts within sociolinguistics (see also Woolard 1985). Despite this divergence in approaches and goals, the multiple strands of sociolinguistics remained interwoven, as seen in several of the collections that were published at this time (Fishman 1970; Giglioli 1972; Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Pride and Holmes 1972). The history of sociolinguistics is therefore one characterized by ongoing cross-disciplinary interaction and influence. Having built on our own perspective to explore the methodological and theoretical issues that mark the past several decades of research in the field, we now consider new developments in sociolinguistics and its relationship to linguistic anthropology.
539
linguistic anthropology has engaged with the critical theory that has helped reshape sociology and its involvement with contemporary societal and political issues. From the wide range of these new studies, we briefly mention two themes: the emphasis on identity rather than community as the focus of sociolinguistic analysis and the concern with the political dimension of language in social life.
540
between a finite set of options or variables. Speech styles, as Irvine (2001) points out, have some of the characteristics of clothing styles in that they can be put on to suit an occasion and a situation. However, speech styles also gain durability as they come to index an identity: though open to frequent revision they remain part of an individuals self-presentation. To quote Giddens again:
in the post-traditional order of modernity and against the backdrop of new forms of mediated experience self identity becomes a reflexively organized endeavor. The reflexive product of the self which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised biographical narrative takes place in the context of multiple choices as filtered through abstract systems . . . . The more tradition looses its hold, and the more daily life is reconstituted in terms of the dialectical interplay of the local and global the more individuals are forced to negotiate lifestyle choices among a diversity of options. (1991: 5)
From this perspective, speech styles become aspects of the social in which ways of talking can represent an individuals self-presentation (Gumperz and CookGumperz 2007). Stemming from such insights, the analysis of speech styles has recently again become central to sociolinguistic investigation (Eckert and Rickford 2001). This issue first arose in the post-war era when sociolinguists became attuned to the role of social-class hierarchies in shaping linguistic prestige and power (Labov 1972), but in the current context, style is viewed not as a sign of structural constraint on the speaker but as a resource for self-positioning.
Journal compilation
541
guise. Susan Gal and Judith Irvine (2000) make this point in commenting on the nineteenth-century linguistic descriptions that determined language boundaries in West Africa and Central Europe. They argue that linguistic ideology, not language practice as such, was the major factor in the original descriptions by which the colonial administrators and European linguists understood regional distinctions:
Each language . . . was represented in an impoverished way to differentiate it from the other and to accord with an ideology about its essence. At the same time, regional varieties that seemed to overlap were ignored. . . . The same notions of language purity that led nineteenth-century linguists to ignore mixed varieties, multilingualism, and expressions they could attribute to linguistic borrowing also discouraged research on African regional dialectology. Once a variety had been declared to belong to the same language as another already-described variety, there was no reason to investigate it, unless its speakers stubbornly refused to speak anything else. (Gal and Irvine 2000: 5657)
In short, once the ideological principle emerged that a standard language was spoken by a people living and speaking within a territorial area which was viewed as a single nation this principle became entrenched within Western (colonial) language history. And the story is one that was repeated around the global from Africa to the South Asian and East Asian subcontinents, and that continues to be an important factor in language policies and politics. Early sociolinguistic researchers addressed the question of linguistic diversity in a rather different but no less problematic way. As we noted above, these scholars had advanced the notion of linguistic repertoires to explain the pervasive plurilingualism they discovered in their empirical research and to account for the totality of verbal resources available to members of speech communities (Gumperz 1971). Repertoires are usually defined as systems of functionally differentiated, partially overlapping speech varieties, such as social and geographical dialects, registers and styles, and trade and professional languages, each with its own grammatical characteristics; the assumption was that speakers choose among these. However, as Gal and Irvine suggest, the very concept of speech community reflects the 1960s sociological thinking that highlighted a view of social order as integrative. The notion of repertoire simply subdivided a larger bounded unit into smaller ones, without challenging the thinking on which this division rests; speech communities continued to be seen as bounded, internally integrated units. In this way, any difference could be treated as positive and nondivisive. All of this rethinking of traditional sociolinguistic concepts and assumptions has led to a radical change in how to understand the internal diversification of todays nation-states and the competing forces in urban environments. Social, political, and technological changes have resulted in a new alignment between sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists exploring language ideologies.
C The authors 2008 Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008
542
Kathryn Woolards article in this issue, for example, argues for the necessity of using the linguistic-anthropological concept of language ideologies to account for fundamental processes of language change within variationist sociolinguistics. Such connections and there are many others in the papers in this special issue point to the value of collaborative work in shedding light on the complex phenomena of late modern societies.
CONCLUSION
In this commentary, we have argued that the fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics have come together again thanks to a new critical awareness of the possibilities that research on language and culture can offer for contemporary issues, much as in early sociolinguistics a new approach grew out of an urgency necessitated by social changes. Such a critical stance is especially appropriate in reconsidering the new issues of language politics and postcolonial language, now seen as part of a changing urban sense of personal identity and belonging. However, this viewpoint does not always assure an alignment between researchers, their publics, and governmental policymakers and funding sources. In todays political and administrative climate, governmental and private funding and channeling of research interests is more likely to be directed to immediate solutions of pressing problems, not to the shaping or directing of long-term intellectual agendas. The concerned public now forms a vocal and critical part of any research on language issues. Researchers are no longer the experts courted by non-specialist outsiders but can easily be seen as just another interested party. Issues like these are vividly illustrated by Charles Briggs and Clara MantiniBriggs (2000) in their study of the cholera epidemic in Venezuela and the repercussions of the governments response for local populations, from which both political and sociolinguistic insights can be gained. Similarly, Diana Eades (1992) shows how a sociolinguistic understanding of communicative practices makes aboriginal populations both more aware of how to make their political case and yet more open to manipulation and persuasion by others. These ethical dilemmas arise as sociolinguists begin to ask questions about whose language and whose concerns are really being addressed in sociolinguistic research. Nor are these issues easy to resolve, as Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren (1998) point out, noting that the researcher, by reflexively becoming part of the research, is also implicated in any debates and disagreements that follow. In other words, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists who seek to engage in the complex politics of language in social life, willing or not, are likely to find themselves either in the role of public intellectuals or public scapegoats. Nevertheless, these positions of intellectual responsibility are an important consequence of the theoretical shift that has brought sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology back into alignment. As the fields continue to develop in tandem, their continued confrontation of such challenges is an
Journal compilation
C C The authors 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008
543
indication of their ongoing engagement in important real-world issues of language, culture, and society and the role of the researcher in addressing them.
NOTE
1. Our thanks to Mary Bucholtz for helpful editorial suggestions.
REFERENCES
Bauman, Richard and Joel Sherzer (eds.). 1974. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge, U.K./New York: Cambridge University Press. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash. 1994. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Traditions and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Bernstein, Basil. 1972. A sociolinguistic approach to socialization with some reference to educability. In John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes (eds.) Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston. 465497. Blommaert, Jan and Jef Verschueren. 1998. Debating Diversity: Analysing the Discourse of Tolerance. London/New York: Routledge. Briggs, Charles and Clara Mantini-Briggs. 2000. Stories in the Time of Cholera. Berkeley, California/London: University of California Press. Cameron, Deborah. 1992. Feminism and Linguistic Theory. New York: St. Martins Press. Cazden, Courtney, Vera John and Dell Hymes. 1972. Functions of Language in the Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Duranti, Alessandro. 1994. From Grammar to Politics. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Eades, Diana. 1992. Aboriginal English and the Law. Brisbane, Australia: Queensland Law Society. Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford, U.K./Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell. Eckert, Penelope and John R. Rickford (eds.). 2001. Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, Charles and John J. Gumperz. 1960. Linguistic diversity: Studies in regional, social and functional variation. Special issue of the International Journal of American Linguistics 26(3). Fishman, Joshua. 1970. Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House. Gal, Susan and Judith T. Irvine. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.) Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School for American Research Press. 3583. Gauchat, Louis. 1905. Lunite phonetique dans le patois dune commune. In Festschrift Heinrich Morf: Aus Romanischen Sprachen und Literaturen. Halle, Germany: Max Niemeyer. 175232.
C The authors 2008 Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008
544
Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Giglioli, Pier Paolo (ed.). 1972. Language and Social Context: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin. Gumperz, John J. 1971. Language and Social Groups. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge, U.K./New York: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, John J. 2001. Interactional sociolinguistics: A personal perspective. In Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi Hamilton (eds.) The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell. 215228. Gumperz, John J. and Jenny Cook-Gumperz. 2007. Style and identity in interactional sociolinguistics. In Peter Auer (ed.) Style and Social Identities: Alternative Approaches to Linguistic Heterogeneity. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. 477498. Gumperz, John J. and Dell Hymes (eds.). 1964. The ethnography of communication. Special issue of American Anthropologist 66(6), part 2. Gumperz, John J. and Dell H. Hymes (eds.). 1972. Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Hymes, Dell H. 1964. Toward ethnographies of communication: Analysis of communicative events. American Anthropologist 66(6): 1225. Hymes, Dell H. 1972. Models of the interaction of language and social life. In John J. Gumperz and Dell H. Hymes (eds.) Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 3571. Hymes, Dell H. 1981. In Vain I Tried to Tell You: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Irvine, Judith. 2001. Style as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford (eds.) Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. 2143. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Concluding statement: Linguistics and poetics. In Thomas Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 350377. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London/New York: Penguin. Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19: 273309. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Milroy, James. 2000. Historical description and the ideology of standard language. In Laura Wright (ed.) The Development of Standard English, 13001800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. 1128. Murray, Stephen O. 1998. American Sociolinguistics: Theorists and Theory Groups. Amsterdam, The Netherlands/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Benjamins. Nida, Eugene. 1975. Language Structure and Translation: Essays of Eugene Nida. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Pike, Kenneth. 1971 [1947]. Phonemics: A Technique for Reducing Language to Writing. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Pride, John and Janet Holmes. 1972. Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton.
Journal compilation
C C The authors 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008
545
Woolard, Kathryn. 1985. Language variation and cultural hegemony: Toward an intergration of sociolinguistics and social theory. American Ethnologist 12: 738 748.
Address correspondence to: John J. Gumperz Department of Anthropology 232 Kroeber Hall University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3710 U.S.A. [email protected]