Toward a History of Modern Sociolinguistics

Abstract

IT APPEARS TO BE A REGULAR PART OF North American culture that when something is declared to be new, few people care to ask a question about what in effect distinguishes the allegedly novel idea or approach from the old. The past is soon forgotten, and people are happy to be part of a trendy present which holds out the promise of becoming the future. There are, of course, reasons for this phenomenon-historical, sociopolitical, and economic; however, an analysis of these reasons is not my concern here. I am simply trying to explain why linguists on this continent usually lack a historical consciousness regarding their own field of study and, as a result, can be easily led into believing claims of novelty, discontinuity, breakthrough, and revolution made by someone in favor of a new product or, for that matter, a theoretical stance. I still recall my own astonishment about the enthusiasm of my teachers for during the late 1960s, which then was, as it is still today, largely associated with the name of William Labov (cf. Macauley 1988, 154-57). In this paper I refer mainly to this brand of sociolinguistics rather than the line of research pursued by scholars coming from sociology (e.g., Bernstein 1960, 1971, Fishman 1972), which is better defined by the phrase SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE; or research programs laid out by scholars with anthropological backgrounds, such as Hymes' ETHNOGRAPHY OF SPEAKING (e.g., Hymes 1974), and by scholars who favor an interactionist, discourse analysis approach (e.g., Gumperz 1971). Given what I noted in my opening sentence, I probably should not have been surprised to find next to nothing on the history of when I first ventured to investigate the subject several years ago.' But I expected a scholar like Dell Hymes, who has written on other aspects of the history of linguistics during the past twenty-five and more years (see Hymes 1983 for a collection of his papers in this area), and who published, among other things, a book called Foundations in Sociolinguistics (1974), to have enlightened us on the origins, sources, and development of the field. However, one searches in vain for any such account in the bibliography of this prolific writer. The closest thing that I could find to date on the history of sociolinguistics was Yakov Malkiel's (1976) paper, which traces its development from Romance scholarship via dialectological work. There are a few brief textbook accounts of the history of sociolinguistics (e.g., Wolfram and Fasold 1972, 26-32; Bell 1976, 28-29; Milroy 1987, 5-11), but these go little